I have no opinion on this, but I do have a meta thought: I wonder if the "quality" of posts is the wrong way to frame the discussion of trends about a community. As an example, it's linguistically like describing an activity as "fun": it means a lot of different things in a lot of different contexts. For instance, the "fun" of having dinner with friends is a lot different than the "fun" of a roller-coaster, but we use the same word for both even though we're really talking about very distinct emotional states. Same thing with "quality", maybe we shouldn't just talk about if posts are better or worse, but rather what trend they're moving towards (if they're moving at all).

I havent been there in years, and I only ever lurked, but I felt like slashdot came close to getting this right, in that you could rate the qualities of something on various axis (ie funny/insightful/interesting), which made scanning the comments really easy. If I didn't want snark I could skip over that easy enough, whereas if I was in the mood for it I could just go all out reading that.

If I were to notice a trend, I would say the site has moved from being a little bit more positive but echo-chambery, to a bit more critical/negative but with more diversity of opinions. I have no opinion on whether that's better or worse, it just feels like a shift of tone to me.

If I were to make a criticism of hacker news though (and it's a minor one -- I'm still here after all), it's that this community is maybe a little too self-serious, out of a terrible fear of becoming redditesque.