That's true, and they were saying it before I joined... but is it true? I know that in the last month quality has certainly dropped a notch, particularly in comments. Certain stories are just awful (the guy that wrote the blog post mocking the job applicant who asked about salary, and the follow-up posts, come to mind). It's still an incredibly high level of signal to noise, better than any other site I know of beyond perhaps MetaFilter, but that doesn't mean it isn't slowly getting worse.

Out of curiosity, do stories flagged by multiple users get auto-deleted? One story I flagged was deleted the moment I hit "flag." Does that work like Digg's "bury" button, or was that just coincidence?