Joined Usenet in 1990 and for a few years it was great.
I always wonder whether HN suffers from periodic influxes of newbies who don't get it yet and rile up the regulars.
There was the Reddit Exodus of 2023 and there seems to be a fair few new accounts posting recently, which feels like an Attempted Agentic Takeover.
It's not periodic so much as continuous. But yes, HN is constantly where Reddit was about 3 years ago and correspondingly declining. E.g. see the rise in "underrated comment" type comments lately.