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Comment by jgrahamc | Hacker News Reader

Wow. I've been hanging out here for 15 years.

Today I learned that I joined HN before jgrahamc. I think I will substitute my Slashdot 5-digit UID for my HN join date as my favorite nerd-humblebrag.

Me and my 6-digit /. UID bow down before you. Now, how many digits in your CompuServe ID?

I can't win them all. You got me there, but only because I never joined it in the first place?

Now I am trying to remember if there was anything special about BBS's that could be used to identify old-timers.

Oldest dated Fidonet message maybe? :-)

Hah... I remember feeling shameful about my 5 digit /. UID because everybody knew the real OG's had 4 digit ones!

God that brings back memories. I checked my /. profile just now and see that I still have an AIM id and an ICQ id listed there. Yikes. And the email address points to a domain I haven't owned in like 15 years. At least the jabber address I had listed is actually still active.

You rang?

[3148]: https://slashdot.org/~raph

Daaaaaaaaayum! You could sell that user for a lot of money!

I remember refreshing slashdot to see the announcement introducing accounts. Teenage me decided to be one of the "the concept of accounts on this site is dumb" folks. (For months after slashdot introduced accounts there were all sorts of AnonymousCowards talking about how dumb the idea was). Eventually I relented and got my 5 digit uid. Years later I would cringe thinking about it, knowing I had an opportunity for a 3 or 4 digit one (when it was still cool and relevant to have such a thing). These days the fact that my reddit account is almost old enough to drive, and my HN account is 14.25 just makes me feel old :D.

The place I really miss is kuro5hin. That site was a gem.

Kuro5hin was amazing until the trolls took over. I really liked the idea of people writing stories and have them subject to editorial comments before they go live. That's sort of what my mental model of what citizen journalism should look like, and what modern scientific journals should be like. I haven't seen anyone do anything quite like it since, which is a shame.

Another site, less known than kuro5hin that was great for awhile was called Jyte. You just post whatever random statement you want, and people can vote "agree" or "disagree". The community was amazing. It was kind of like a game where you try to find some issue where reasonable people are roughly equally split. It was also something where you could just interject any topic you like for any reason. Maybe that's what people get out of twitter -- I don't use it myself.

Same here, even though in the early years I was still trying to hang out more on programmning.reddit.com. But I don't think that extended into 2008 and I'm too lazy to check now.

Also, checking now I can't believe I joined so soon after this website was announced. Now I wish I had invested in BTC when it was considered as expensive at $100.

It'd be interesting to see how many of those first cohorts are still active.

Never been much for commenting, but absorbed a lot from the knowledge you dropped back then.

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