What do they add to the community, other than flames and at least half-a-frontpageful of uninteresting articles about (Apple|Google|Microsoft|otherbigtechcorp) doing this and that? These are the articles that you'd find in any mainstream tech media anyway. These also tend to generate too much opinions (it's easy to have one) without so much deep thought and technical discussion. Maybe my memory is hazy but I think HN was really quite different back when I first got interested in it.