All perceptions are in the eye of the beholder. Anyway, my unobjective measure is number of interesting articles and discussions I want to read after scanning the front page. It’s declining over the years.
It’s not really surprising since there are two contributing trends:
Online communities generally degrade as they increase in size.
Attention economy brings “heat death” of internet: amount of produced content is higher, quality is lower.
There's the notion of where good conversations are found, or what sources are referenced by external sources, or what links where will result in more traffic (or conversions) to linked sites / services.
There's metrics such as MAU and user time-on-site.
As dang noted in another recent comment, one of HN's scarcest commodities is its front-page slots. As with attention and time/day, that's an absolutely rivalrous good, and one which decreases comparatively as the site increases in size and volume -- more users means more competition for the 30 front-page slots per user.
And if more stories rotate through those slots, there will be either less time per story, or a restricted exposure (e.g., stories presented to only a subset of readers), or both. (I'm not sure what HN's specific mechanics are here, though I believe it's a mix of both.)
It’s not really surprising since there are two contributing trends:
Online communities generally degrade as they increase in size.
Attention economy brings “heat death” of internet: amount of produced content is higher, quality is lower.