> This site really isn't news for hackers, either...
I would consider this actually to be a serious point. Indeed there exist people who complain that the focus of Hacker News has shifted from what it was in the past.
I suspect someone was making that complaint by day two. Every community (online and offline) has a tendency to talk about how the community has changed, typically in a derogatory manner.
This is perfectly explainable: Very often, early adaptors of, say, communities are a very different breed of people than people who join the community in a later phase.
So, it is the behaviour to expect that sooner or later these early adaptors that lead to the initial growth of the community won't feel home anymore.
There's that, and there's also the tendency for humans to feel nostalgia for a time that never was. Memories are poor. I suspect if people were asked to guess whether a thread was from today or 2008, they'd get a lot wrong (aside from chronological details giving clues).
