It is. In the history of social news aggregators, and social networking sites in general, the quality of the user generated content on the site tends to go down as the number of users increases. I think the first example of this was Digg. When I first started frequenting Digg in the beta phase there were many technically interesting stories and bright people. When more people showed up the general tenor of discussion and submission started to fail. The same trend happened soon after in sites like Youtube and Reddit.<p>As Paul Graham has written, Hacker News is an experiment in social news/networking—can a social news site continue to keep a high standard of discourse despite increasing population? If HN follows the Reddit path, then it seems PG failed.