Hacker News Needs Honeypots
"Nevertheless, I do believe that we are seeing a continuing trend downward in overall article quality on the front page."I agree comment quality has decreased, but I'm not so sure about the frontpage.  I created http://news.ycombinator.com/classic so I could detect frontpage decline.  It shows what the frontpage would look like if we only counted votes of users who joined HN in the first year.  Usually it looks the same as the frontpage, but with a time lag because there are fewer voters.