Tell HN: I'm done with HN for a while, maybe forever

A couple years ago I found a wonderful little gem on the Internet called Hacker News. It was a community of like-minded folks, building a place dedicated to the synthesis of business and technology. It was free of the kind of chaos, irrational thought, politics, memes and other hallmarks of most community websites and stayed true to its core foundational guidelines. It was also a place where its focus of topics could be debated, vigorously, people could meet and build cool things and ultimately discuss things that hackers found near and dear.

There's an ever present meta-discussion on HN about maintaining this high quality resource -- even if the trade-off is a smaller community. Community policing, a set of clear guidelines a dedicated panel of super-users and the clear piloting of pg all kept this site at an unusually high quality, focused and prevented it from sliding down the reddit->digg->4chan slippery slope for a very long time.

However, this post http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2053228 and the resulting "discussion" reminded me of something that's been troubling me about the site for a while... In the last six months or so the quality of the site and the community have slipped -- severely: the topics that make the front page are less interesting, off-topic (e.g. politics or non-hackery current events), karma voting is a crap shoot with unclear semantics and the commentary has started dropping to near reddit levels and moving south fast. PG seems largely aloof from his piloting role, and all out flame wars are erupting over tiny bits of pedantry. The post in question is a symbol of the state of the site. Content-free comments are rewarded, while rational discourse is beaten down with a stick.

As an example, the highest rated comment is, in its entirety "They're not legally required to be so badass about it." with 91 points, while the second highest (with 73) is "This is a very elegant way of giving them the finger.". This is nonsense. While witty (and not deserving of any downvotes), neither comment really brought anything to the discussion, put forward no information or insight, and ultimately could have been left out entirely from the discussion without diminishing the commentary about the post in any way. In effect, these two content free posts slurped up the lions share of the karma and the discussion of the post. The rest of the discussion was similarly dreadful.

Worse, the site has become predictable and a refuge for an irrational set of users focused on long-tail topics. On any given day the majority of the front page is covered by topics that represent such an infinitesimal part of the overal business-tech scene that reading them probably loses me money. That's okay if it represents a small portion of the overall content (even unpopular ideas can have merit), but I know that anytime I go to the site, the front page will pretty much be dominated by:

Haskell, Clojure and Lisp - (sorry guys, not a big enough language ecosystem for me or the rest of the business world to care)

Something about how Apple is great - (with an associated group think commentary so irrationally incestuously inbred it makes my head hurt sometimes)

Interviews or articles on people not associated with the tech business community

Weight-loss or Weight-building tips

Cooking ideas

A few politics posts (recently wikipedia or TSA, but doesn't deviate far from those types of topics -- usually with no business and/or tech discussion around those topics in any way)

And maybe, if we're lucky that day, a smattering of on-topic posts that HN is famous for.

Voting is similarly predictable. Contrary statements to "let's stick it to the man" notions are downvoted. Anything that represents that sort of counter-culture ethos are slavishly drooled over while perfectly acceptable (and better performing alternatives) are shot down. Appeals to rationality and logic are met with a public beating while illogical and impractical appeals to emotion are lauded.

The semantics o...