Quickly browsing through leaves me with the impression that HackerNews has really done a great job of preserving the culture of the website. Meanwhile, Reddit has gotten so much worse, so much more political, even in the last ~7 years.
But the subreddits for your favorite band or hobby are alive and healthy.
HN’s culture might be “preserved” but it’s not perfect. Personally, it irks me how humorless this place is. Jokes are often not allowed here.
Some of my highest-voted comments have been pure humor or satire. Here's an example (my two comments in the thread; start at the top for context):
When jokes are fully accepted they tend to be lower effort than a comment that is thoughtful, and in reddit they tend to get more upvotes than the thoughtful one. This incentives people to write low effort jokes in order to get more fake points. The tendency thus created alienates rational discussion and doesn't bring much information.
There are already places in where you can be witty instead of wise, but this is not one of them.
On Reddit there is a lot of jokes, but most of them are replicas or just pure memes that gets repeated ad infinitum, nothing that really cracks me up except some rare ones. But on HN, when there is a highly upvoted comment with a joke somewhere within, it's always good one that contributes to the comments otherwise insightful points.
The problem is when everyone thinks that they have some unique insight and that their cynical one-liners are worthy to be written down. Put that together with the development of "in-groups", and you'd see most of the threads becoming sequences of re-hashed jokes. You get "ha-ha funny" posts, but you get no one really challenging anything related to the topic and you drown out those that might actually have something to add to the conversation.
Good comedy/satire works when it manages to bring new insight into a topic. If you have such talent and your comment can be insightful and humorous, I doubt you'd have trouble with the crowd.
But if you want serious and mostly respectful discussions (people losing their cool and attacking others also gets downvoted quite harshly), you’ve got HN. You can criticise it; it definitely sometimes is just smugness or low-effort cynicism. It’s not perfect, but it sure as heck is one of the best communities I’ve ever seen.
If this place became like Reddit, it’d lose its whole raison d'être.
Still, HK is one of the only forum type of sites I visit anymore.
I gave up on Reddit. Most forums are long dead. I don't have time to keep up on some discord channel. Don't use Facebook.
So I'm grateful for HN.
I don't get all of this Golden Age talk. I thought it was less boring when half of it was /b/, but the idea that it was apolitical is weird.
Most of these subcultures have been banned today but reddit acted as a massive force multiplier for these movements.
For example, the 'lesbians' subreddit is full of pornography, and the 'actuallesbians' subreddit is full of men pretending to be women. Any attempt by women to start a subreddit exclusively for women inevitably gets banned.
There are women-only spaces on Reddit (or at least they claim to be, impossible to verify obviously) just like there are male-only spaces on Reddit (and both goes for the internet in general), you just need to know where to look.
> Any attempt by women to start a subreddit exclusively for women inevitably gets banned.
I would love to see where this has happened, as I haven't seen it before. I don't find it hard to believe, but want to see it happening in practice before jumping to any conclusions.
Edit: To add another example from this very submission, which is a common way of framing things (on the internet):
> Alright boys, I think I have figured out where the timeline went wrong [...]
This doesn't prove that it'll happen to _every_ women-only subreddit, but I think the previous poster is alluding to the ban on several radical feminism subreddits. I'm sure more detail can be found on their new home, which rhymes with "we are over it".
https://www.wired.com/story/finding-lena-the-patron-saint-of...
A brief report from a 1997 IS&T conference where Lena was a special guest (also SFW except for one link that has a warning next to it):
http://www.lenna.org/lenna_visit.html
An article from The Pudding about Lena's wish for her Playboy image to stop being used:
https://pudding.cool/2021/10/lenna/
And her Wikipedia page:
By "exclusively for women" he means "excludes trans women".