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

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.

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.

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