Standard disclaimer that this is from my fallible memory. I’ve been here just about daily since 2009 or so (at first, under a real-name account that I retired,

Standard disclaimer that this is from my fallible memory. I’ve been here just about daily since 2009 or so (at first, under a real-name account that I retired, because times a’changed). Of course, there were far, far fewer users. They had much less forgettable names. There wasn’t the preponderance of throwaways that you see now. My impression was that a large portion of the users were actually affiliated with YC companies, and a lot of the discussion was about YC business and tech. Paul Graham was an active commenter. You got to know who the regulars were, and recognize them by name. I find that much harder to do now. As far as content, I honestly can’t remember whether there was really more tech, or more business, or less politics. What I do is that the issues, and the way people frame and debate them, has changed a lot in 12 years. But that’s not specific to HN. HN seems to lag behind “the discourse” on more mainstream social media sites, and I think that’s good. Sometime around 2011 (?) there was a crisis in which there was a great deal of debate over a period of months, about whether the quality of comments and discussion was declining. I was of the opinion that comment quality had been extremely high at first, and was in fact slipping. The other side said we were imagining things, and Eternal Septembering or whatever. pg eventually sort of agreed there was a problem, and asked for solutions. There was much debate. He made some tweaks to the site. But the perception of decline remained. pg seemed to gradually back away from what he had created. At some point we got the high-profile active moderation you see today. pg has been almost entirely absent for years now.