Agreed. Although there has been a considerable amount of "unsuitable" material make it to the front page of HN, there has also been a lot of pointless citation of this unsuitable material - to the degree that it dominates constructive dialog taking place.
HN is changing, no doubt, but as has been pointed out time and time again on HN, if it is of interest to the community at large, it belongs. The community is changing (undeniable) but, maybe it is that sometimes posts other than an amazing O(N) bubble sort are also of interest...
I, for one, enjoy chuckling at XKCD - typically I just go there myself (without the aid of a social bookmark site!), but perhaps this one is just relevant enough to make it on HN... Or maybe I am wrong.
It seems to me though that posting something like XKCD is simply for getting Karma. It's not like the people who read it don't already check every monday,wednesday and friday morning... or is that just me?
Not just you, but I belong in the camp that never checks xkcd on my own. Not a fan, probably never will be, but if the community thinks its interesting, might as well. This one was indeed interesting.
Anything updated periodically probably works better with RSS (subscription model), while sites like Hacker News seem better at aggregating interesting scattered content (and hosting the resulting discussion). There's certainly room for overlap (e.g. "look at the interesting post on this blog, subscribe if you like it"), but people submitting every single update as they occur will probably detract from the signal here.
