I was a BBS kid in the 90s. At the pre-Internet cusp, as a lonely, alienated teen I found community through online message forums. Even now, I'm very much dra

I was a BBS kid in the 90s. At the pre-Internet cusp, as a lonely, alienated teen I found community through online message forums. Even now, I'm very much drawn to the back-and-forth of debate, conversation, sharing of ideas and so forth. I made friends like this in those days. This a) prevented me from becoming a degenerate / criminal / dropout as I was pretty alienated and angry as a teen; b) motivated me to learn how to be a sysadmin out of hobby, and not because I ever thought there was a job in it but because my BBS Server required connectivity to FIDONet or whatever, I was fiddling with OS/2 Warp, Linux, and Windows NT out of curiosity and broke stuff I had to fix myself; c) made me friends I have to this day, as an old guy; and of course d) set me on a path to a high paying tech profession today. When the Internet became commercialized (as in, available to the masses) in the middle-late 90's, I remember the BBS software got ported to web apps. There was a mix of desktop clients that connected to the BBS servers (complete with VGA online games instead of ANSI now), and these new Web interfaces to the message forums. It just didn't last. It only took a year or two for it to be apparent to all of us that the Internet sucked for this. I'm going to put my elitist hat on here. The popularity dilutes things. You sic a bunch of randos on a message board or forum, you'll often get the dumbest of the dumb rising to the surface, mean stuff (although there was plenty of mean stuff on BBSes too, complete with death threats, police calls on users and subpoenas, other drama), and most importantly a mediocrity that surfaces. How HN manages to avoid this is quite impressive. It's not completely immune. Sometimes I see really intelligent and rational comments being greyed out for reasons that I believe are ideological. And sometimes top comments are mundane. But overall there's an extremely high level of competency, intelligence and literacy on HN. You forget that most people don't have anything close to these writing and reasoning skills.