4 ms·

I remember visiting this site daily 10-15 years ago, in russian, ofc. The moderation was super high, karma system worked great, the content quality was astonish

I remember visiting this site daily 10-15 years ago, in russian, ofc. The moderation was super high, karma system worked great, the content quality was astonishing. Then they switched up owners, tried heavily monetizing corpo-pseudo-blogpost-marketing crap and it all went downhill from there

balamatom 1y ago
habr is an institution. it's like the "runet hn", minus wild west vc ecosystem, plus integrated blog posting like lj ogs intended to. probably helps a lot with original work like TFA getting traction. more power to that! runet sites of that era are often born out of the hacker's characteristic contrarian attitude "because we can". attempts to monetize them in more recent years are bound to accomplish little more than fuck up the content quality and/or the "owner cashes out and opens cafe" thing. nevertheless, to this day, when i think habrahabr, i think way higher bar for technical competence than hn. it's all in the attitude.
- wearable 1y ago
  What are the modern equivalents of habr?
  - throw-the-towel 1y ago
    There's probably none. The Russian Internet has been Eternal Septembered too much for something similar to appear.
    - balamatom 1y ago
      if i knew any, i sure as fuck wouldn't post them on hn of all places.
0x457 1y ago
It went downhill when they allowed getting an invitation via single blog post, requiring just one person to like it enough to give an invitation. Which wasn't hard to write - just translate something popular from hackernews before anyone else does it. Shortly after, it became hilariously easy to farm and manipulate karma balances across the entire site. With 50 accounts (mults or real people all the same) you could create a new account a day. Monetization started when it was already in a death spiral.
- NooneAtAll3 1y ago
  don't forget the awful redesign, including completely replacing post formatter all accumulated mastery of creating posts by experienced authors - gone overnight
jojobas 1y ago
It was also notoriously politics-free, until something happened.

balamatom 1y ago

habr is an institution. it's like the "runet hn", minus wild west vc ecosystem, plus integrated blog posting like lj ogs intended to. probably helps a lot with original work like TFA getting traction. more power to that! runet sites of that era are often born out of the hacker's characteristic contrarian attitude "because we can". attempts to monetize them in more recent years are bound to accomplish little more than fuck up the content quality and/or the "owner cashes out and opens cafe" thing. nevertheless, to this day, when i think habrahabr, i think way higher bar for technical competence than hn. it's all in the attitude.

wearable 1y ago
What are the modern equivalents of habr?
- throw-the-towel 1y ago
  There's probably none. The Russian Internet has been Eternal Septembered too much for something similar to appear.
  - balamatom 1y ago
    if i knew any, i sure as fuck wouldn't post them on hn of all places.

0x457 1y ago

It went downhill when they allowed getting an invitation via single blog post, requiring just one person to like it enough to give an invitation. Which wasn't hard to write - just translate something popular from hackernews before anyone else does it. Shortly after, it became hilariously easy to farm and manipulate karma balances across the entire site. With 50 accounts (mults or real people all the same) you could create a new account a day. Monetization started when it was already in a death spiral.

NooneAtAll3 1y ago
don't forget the awful redesign, including completely replacing post formatter all accumulated mastery of creating posts by experienced authors - gone overnight

jojobas 1y ago

It was also notoriously politics-free, until something happened.