Sites like HN can't escape Parkinson's law of triviality: Complex or mixed-conclusion content will naturally get drown out by easily "understood" (at least in the perception of the reader) and debated material.
Titles play a large part as well, as they allow people to support or reject a notion without the effort of even following the link.
This isn't meant to be grumpy or conspiratorial, nor is it negative about HN, it's just the way these things often work. HN does not measure or demand that you follow a link to click the arrow (nor does it require it for "flag", which is a used in practice to downvote). It doesn't maintain a history of recently visited items to ease voting on content you may have read earlier in the day. These naturally lend themselves to cheap votes.
HN has always been rather intensively curated. You may be right about the statistical trend, but conscious intervention can reverse this "entropy" somewhat in our limited context. The question is how we can do this better.
Fascinatingly, the number of stories posted to the site has not been increasing:
That might be a good thing. The number of substantive HN-appropriate stories in the world is not growing by leaps and bounds; neither, therefore, should our story stream. We want quality, not quantity.
There's a lot we can do about story quality, because the front page is so limited, there are many fewer stories than comments, and because we manage the front page for quality in ways we could never manage the threads. However, there's no way we can scan the universe of stories to find all the best ones. We rely on /newest to be our universe of stories. If /newest is broken, we'll fix it. But we're going to focus on the problem of bad comments first.
I'm happy to see these are the priorities. To emphasize comments > submissions, my HN app for android opens all articles directly to the comments. it takes 2 clicks to see the submitted link.
Titles play a large part as well, as they allow people to support or reject a notion without the effort of even following the link.
This isn't meant to be grumpy or conspiratorial, nor is it negative about HN, it's just the way these things often work. HN does not measure or demand that you follow a link to click the arrow (nor does it require it for "flag", which is a used in practice to downvote). It doesn't maintain a history of recently visited items to ease voting on content you may have read earlier in the day. These naturally lend themselves to cheap votes.