Democratization of access has its victims.

I miss the old newsgroups. I wish we could land again in that weird, colorful oceans of geeky individuals with their quirks and interesting nerdy takes.

15 years ago, HN was about bootstrapping and early YC stars.

10 years ago, HN was in full VC-enterprise sauce.

5 years ago, it was crypto and NFTs, and how I switch jobs every quarter.

Now it is a blurry view into the future through the black mirror of AI.

How could we jump back into the cozy past again?

I do not have a clear answer, but what seems to work for you are small groups of friends and friends of friends hanging out on WhatsApp or Discord, discussing geeky news together in the context of their backgrounds. But these are very curated and very closed groups, still operating on the social media platforms of behemoths.

Would now be the right time to restart self-hosted message boards or Mattermost/Campfire instances?

Is that really the problem, though, or has the audience simply changed? It seems to me that the thoughtful deep dives of years past are still being produced, but they're buried under a much larger volume of lighter content. More importantly, many of the people working at the forefront of technology and product development appear to have moved to private communities such as Discord, Slack, and similar groups, perhaps in part because of NDAs.

I'm nostalgic for the new JS framework every day era. Say what you will about that era but people were writing the code by hand, so looking back it all feels "hand-crafted" and quaint. You had to copy paste that express app from a medium.com article instead of prompting an LLM to scaffold a whole project in one second.

The issue is the tech and the motives to wield it. Cosy decentralized message boards exist, thankfully outside the realm of the greater public.

The moment that the greater public sees these high trust networks and tries to join them, all the bad actors and their armies of bots will follow and I mourn for the recreation time of any admin who has to suddenly deal with that.

Private walled gardens seem to be the only way forward for now. If you love something, do not share it here

Discord is actively torpedoing small, niche, or marginalized communities. Not a safe place.

> How could we jump back into the cozy past again?

"You can't go back home to your family, back home to your childhood ... back home to a young man's dreams of glory and of fame ... back home to places in the country, back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting, but which are changing all the time - back home to the escapes of Time and Memory."

> How could we jump back into the cozy past again?

Delete 9/10th of the HN population. I could accept even AI discussion if there wasn't so much of it, and so many posts in general; /new is like trying to win the lottery.

It doesn't matter how interesting it is, you just have to be lucky. The corollary is that the front page isn't the most interesting stuff posted today, it's a list of who's got lucky posting the average topic for the average reader.

Run a self hosted forum or instance of whatever you like, and just only let people sign up if they are recommended by someone or can argue their way in, basically. xenforo and some add ons can do that, and I'm sure there's a few self hosted messaging apps like you mention but I'm not as familiar

On the topic, I agree smaller groups are the only way to achieve this.

Here is a protptype of how easy it is to setup a forum on onionv3 service. Just a few commands and your off.

https://gitlab.com/here_forawhile/torum

I think you answered your own question, simply un-democratize access. Go places with high barriers of entry.

Matrix works fine for the friend to friend, small community things. Discourse forums too. Use Signal for family and friends, perhaps work. Fediverse and Atmosphere (Bluesky) for your microblog needs, and RSS to keep track of blogs.

I never cared much for newsgroups, they were mostly nice for the historical stuff. I do miss IRC though, as toxic as it could be. I could run it in a little terminal on any system without download electron apps and being spammed with ads (discord).

> Democratization of access has its victims.

Democracies require conserved stake to function. How individuals initially get that stake is a degree of freedom, but if the stake can be printed freely, the system is unstable.

For working implementations of democracy, look at: invite trees, shareholder corporations, proof-of-stake distributed ledgers, etc.

You forgot to mention the "JS-framework-of-the-month" years :-D

"Democratization of access has its victims."

If it were democratization, we'd all have access to the data that underlies this dataset. In reality, this will destroy the origins of the data, and it will become hidden for all of humanity.

It is a tragedy of the commons of the highest order.

They will talk about how they are trying to protect humanity all while putting it behind a paywall.

Eternal September: AI edition

the composition of HN has changed to be a lot more leftist and less capitalist, and I don't think that'll change anytime soon

I joined HN 13 years ago (2 years after you), and back then I saw it as a bunch of libertarians and venture capitalists and some open source (and/or functional programming) enthusiast with a few interesting and nerdy projects. I was mostly here for the news about new and useful technology.

I think the visual weight of the first group has increased over time as their projects of making a bunch of money while offering nothing of value has been validated more and more by our capitalist economy.

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I thought we were all about inclusion these days. I'd be wary of sharing such retrograde sentiments, you might hurt an LLM.