I respect your awareness of that, which I'm sure is much broader than mine is. HN consumes my attention; I'm all depth and no breadth.

What I'm interested in is how well HN does at fulfilling its own mandate in its own terms. On that scale, it's getting worse—in this respect, at least, which is a big one. We're going to do something about it, the same way we've always tried to stave off the decline of this place (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...).

If you're right that the phenomenon is affecting other places even more than HN then I guess we get to be the-worst-internet-forum-except-for-all-the-others even more than before (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13494318, https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...) - not a bad outcome for HN, though I think it might be overly optimistic.