Pre-2020 had far more informative posts and discussions. While we still have decent conversations post-covid, the quality has slid downhill somewhat.

Every few years I get to thinking I want to do some research on this and then maybe make a combo karma age filter, and then I go read some posts from 2017 and I think “it was better, but I don’t know if it was that much better.”

Excepting the last year - things see dark for a lot of users here in the last year.

Fair point. Rose-tinted glasses and all.

I think that's indicative of the Internet as a whole for a vast array of reasons, and even so, HN still maintains a far higher bar for discussion.

I totally agree that the metric is imperfect for a long term analysis. I was initially leaning toward a quantile based approach to really focus in on topic trends over time, but when I was initially exploring the data, the relative challenge of having a Show HN become popular in 2025 compared to previous years caught my curiosity, and for this decade I felt a static cutoff provided a simple and easy to understand threshold.

I do think as a metric for total reach, a static cutoff actually works reasonably well. I think some form of square root normalization over total users is probably the best balance.