4 ms·

I dont know the old HN (how old exactly?), but what I know is that it has not changed that much in the last ~4 years in my opinion.

sillysaurus3 11y ago
Amusingly, that's precisely correct. This was 5 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2403696 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2403696 This is just an old guy being cranky for the old days. Maybe with a dash of ineffectual rose-tinted glasses thrown in. It's probably more a reflection of me than of the site. The feeling you got when you discovered HN a month after pg opened it up was just electric. When it went away, I started scheming to get it back. Then half a decade passed, and now I can't stop wondering whether it was just a fluke of the world. Maybe it can never happen again, and it's therefore ridiculous to expect it to stay. Or maybe pining for the old days is what people have been doing for ten thousand years in spite of all the amazing progress. I just miss the feeling of sneaking into a secret club where everyone is way smarter than I am. This current thread is way beyond my abilities to even address, but I love to listen to people who can. Then I realized maybe it's beyond everyone's abilities on the site. Realizing that there are really capable people over on SO made me wonder: where are those people? Can I go listen to them talk about really hard technical topics and then ask them questions? You can't really ask questions on SO, since your words will be ruthlessly purged (with good reason); it's pretty much the opposite of a relaxed setting. All of this is entirely off-topic of course, so it should probably be detached from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10737507 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10737507 and marked as such. But the old days existed. It was so weird. Seeing what it was, and then realizing that it went away, and then realizing it never "should" have even happened in the first place... That it was either an accident or a brilliant design... Everything about it is just so weird.
- dang 11y ago
  Secret club feelings are one thing, but in terms of HN's content, most things people say about the old days are probably nostalgia bias. Since you pinpointed 5 years ago, I looked up the front page from 6 years ago: https://web.archive.org/web/20091215131033/http://news.ycombinator.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20091215131033/http://news.ycomb... That's surprisingly little different than how HN would look today, except there's arguably more fluff there.
  - brudgers 11y ago
    Six years ago $1.5 million in funding was front page news. The numbers have become orders of magnitude larger.
  - sillysaurus3 11y ago
    Certainly. The front page was sometimes an issue, but it never got to be a big problem. The comments, though... Those were something special. Pg's in particular. C.f. today vs https://web.archive.org/web/20080506031933/http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2987 https://web.archive.org/web/20080506031933/http://news.ycomb... I remember precisely when the time period ended, because it was so disappointing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2604359 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2604359 What was it about the early comments that were so good? The commenters were happy, for one. Most of life was pretty dull, and it felt like HN was where people came to life. There was less drama; people were less likely to type out a comment due to anger or frustration. They were also stronger. People felt like they could influence the world, so they didn't spend a lot of time talking about how to do that, or how the world should be. There was more discussion about intellectual pursuits, or just interesting observations about the world. The comment threads nowadays are pushy. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10748834 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10748834 This is the opposite of how it felt in the early days, I think. People were more inquisitive, so they were less aggressive. There is certainly a component of rose-tinted glasses here, though. Most of my feelings are because I was still pretty young. It was almost a decade ago.
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]

sillysaurus3 11y ago

Amusingly, that's precisely correct. This was 5 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2403696 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2403696 This is just an old guy being cranky for the old days. Maybe with a dash of ineffectual rose-tinted glasses thrown in. It's probably more a reflection of me than of the site. The feeling you got when you discovered HN a month after pg opened it up was just electric. When it went away, I started scheming to get it back. Then half a decade passed, and now I can't stop wondering whether it was just a fluke of the world. Maybe it can never happen again, and it's therefore ridiculous to expect it to stay. Or maybe pining for the old days is what people have been doing for ten thousand years in spite of all the amazing progress. I just miss the feeling of sneaking into a secret club where everyone is way smarter than I am. This current thread is way beyond my abilities to even address, but I love to listen to people who can. Then I realized maybe it's beyond everyone's abilities on the site. Realizing that there are really capable people over on SO made me wonder: where are those people? Can I go listen to them talk about really hard technical topics and then ask them questions? You can't really ask questions on SO, since your words will be ruthlessly purged (with good reason); it's pretty much the opposite of a relaxed setting. All of this is entirely off-topic of course, so it should probably be detached from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10737507 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10737507 and marked as such. But the old days existed. It was so weird. Seeing what it was, and then realizing that it went away, and then realizing it never "should" have even happened in the first place... That it was either an accident or a brilliant design... Everything about it is just so weird.

dang 11y ago
Secret club feelings are one thing, but in terms of HN's content, most things people say about the old days are probably nostalgia bias. Since you pinpointed 5 years ago, I looked up the front page from 6 years ago: https://web.archive.org/web/20091215131033/http://news.ycombinator.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20091215131033/http://news.ycomb... That's surprisingly little different than how HN would look today, except there's arguably more fluff there.
- brudgers 11y ago
  Six years ago $1.5 million in funding was front page news. The numbers have become orders of magnitude larger.
- sillysaurus3 11y ago
  Certainly. The front page was sometimes an issue, but it never got to be a big problem. The comments, though... Those were something special. Pg's in particular. C.f. today vs https://web.archive.org/web/20080506031933/http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2987 https://web.archive.org/web/20080506031933/http://news.ycomb... I remember precisely when the time period ended, because it was so disappointing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2604359 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2604359 What was it about the early comments that were so good? The commenters were happy, for one. Most of life was pretty dull, and it felt like HN was where people came to life. There was less drama; people were less likely to type out a comment due to anger or frustration. They were also stronger. People felt like they could influence the world, so they didn't spend a lot of time talking about how to do that, or how the world should be. There was more discussion about intellectual pursuits, or just interesting observations about the world. The comment threads nowadays are pushy. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10748834 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10748834 This is the opposite of how it felt in the early days, I think. People were more inquisitive, so they were less aggressive. There is certainly a component of rose-tinted glasses here, though. Most of my feelings are because I was still pretty young. It was almost a decade ago.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]