I'm certainly not an extreme HN old timer, but I've been visiting for a fair number of years and I've seen this sort of complaint since I started, while article quality doesn't seem to have gone down noticeably. In fact, the site rules even caution against complaining that HN is "becoming Reddit", which is essentially the old version of this comment. The fact is that, even here, there will always be a few poor quality articles that slip through.
BTW, pointing out that a particular article is poor, like qeternity's comment, is worthwhile. It's just comments that complain all of HN is going downhill that are tiresome.
Article quality has IMO gone down considerably in the last 2-3 years ever since LLMs became a thing. Probably not because LLM articles are upvoted by humans, but more likely because it's much easier to create and manage realistic bot fake accounts with LLMs.
We're at a point where it's impossible to tell which users are bots and which are human by looking at their comments.
I’m an old-timer so I’ve seen multiple cycles of the front page being dominated by a PR blitz. Sometimes it’s startup/money-driven (e.g. mobile applications via smartphone adoption), sometimes it’s a community that organizes elsewhere to promote something to the HN readership in a disciplined way (e.g. Rust), sometimes it’s both (e.g. crypto).
What feels different about this one is that it seems very “top down”, it has the flavor of almost lossless transmission of PR/fundraise diktat from VC/frontier vendor exec/institutional NVIDIA-long fund to militant AGI-next-year-ism at the workaday HN commenter level.
Maybe the powers that be genuinely know something the rest of us don’t, maybe they’re just pot committed (consistent with public evidence), I’m not sure. It’s been kind of a while since the GPT3 -> GPT4 discontinuous event that looked like the first sample from an exponential capability curve. Since then it’s been like, it can use a mouse now. Well, it can kinda use a mouse now. Hey that sounds a lot like the robot in Her.
But whatever the reason, this one is for all the marbles.
BTW, pointing out that a particular article is poor, like qeternity's comment, is worthwhile. It's just comments that complain all of HN is going downhill that are tiresome.