I used to feel the same way. My memories from back in the day were all articles about crazy programming languages, and cool new things people were doing. But that's when I was just starting out. In retrospect, I don't think that Hacker News has changed much, those articles are still there, but now I just get suckered into these kinds of articles for some reason. I think most people here will find much the same, when you join, you find the cool stuff. As you stick around, you start to get pulled into the linkbait/news type articles. As I'm sure people think it had already gone downhill by the time I joined 1.5yrs ago...