A sort of, counterargument:
I think that individuals don't change that much. Most, almost all of my friends haven't changed. Change is difficult and deliberate.<p>We get better at sorting through "noise" over time. What is noise to one person is music to someone else.<p>I'd argue that hacker news is changing as it grows - what started out as an acute viewpoint of like-minded people is growing into a fairly diverse membership that agrees on principles. This increases the noise for everyone else.<p>Services like HackerFollow and Twitter let us find and hang on to individuals in an otherwise growing and therefore noisier environment.<p>[edit: Removed 'slowly' from in front of 'growing'.]
HackerFollow has an SQL injection problem. When it asked me for a login phrase, I typed in "I'm a skier" and got a nice MySQL error, probably because of the ' character.