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Comment by mgl | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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.

Is this comment... satire?

>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.

You mean they had to import it from NPM and compile it from Typescript, right? I don't think anyone's copied and pasted JS since JQuery was a thing.

At least there was some genuine effort involved there. What I find most disheartening about the current wave of AI-generated projects is that there's often very little personal involvement - someone had a general idea and asked Claude (or whatever) to implement it for them, and the results are much more representative of the AI agent's tendencies than the author's intent.

> 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.

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.

Torpedoing how?

> 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."

Well sometimes you can

“No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it is not the same river and he is not the same man.”

I'm seeing this nostalgic sentiment a lot on forums these days, but it's not just about bringing back ye old usenet groups: you also need to bring back the way people thought back then. It's hard.

The sentiment I'm seeing is that, to avoid the rose-tinted bias of nostalgia, we default to believing there is nothing the past has to teach us, and everything is just better today.

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

IRC is small and niche enough to be a good place for more ephemeral discussion if you have a bouncer to stay connected for you. Chat on it tends to move slowly, and the userbase trends more towards actual nerds.

I do not think this is a technology problem.

I think it is a problem of how we changed: shorter attention spans, and a much larger volume of information to process.

Short forms win, long forms vanish, which is a tragedy in itself as good writing requires good understanding, and understanding is impossible without attention.

I'm in my 40s. I remember lcamtuf from pl.comp.security when I was just getting started playing with FreeBSD and other fun stuff.

I still use a forum like that. You don't need an enormous community to have good discussions - 100 active users creates quite a lot.

It's a community issue, not a technical one, but you have to intentionally create the community.

Yes exactly. People have changed too. We're not going back. But we can hope that something new and better can one day appear.

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.

You don't even need explicit barriers, the masses are staying on Reddit/Twitter regardless. Only the discerning are seeking out better and newer options and those options are staying the right size rather than absorbing the eternal September.

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).

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.

Having used Matrix for almost a decade, it's hot garbage.

Sync is barely working, "unable to decrypt" still exists, the encryption is flawed [0] and the whole thing is effectively just Element and everyone else follows their lead.

[0]: https://soatok.blog/2026/02/17/cryptographic-issues-in-matri...

Element in particular is embarrassingly bad. (Consistently, for the past 5 years, through the present)

About the post you linked, see [1] and [2], which makes me question both whether that is an actual vulnerability (Signal, the messenger recommended by the author, also didn't have that check, and it's addition is absent from release notes and CVEs) and whether the post was made in good faith (the check was added to libsignal on the same day that the author disclosed the vulnerability to Matrix, which can be a coincidence, but doesn't seem likely given that the code has been there for years).

Can't speak about the other issues, I haven't had those but I barely use it. Based on comments, it's clear they exist or have existed for quite some time.

[1] https://blog.erinshepherd.net/2026/02/non-contributory-keys-...

[2] https://matrix.org/blog/2026/02/analysis-of-reported-issues-...

> About the post you linked, see [1] and [2], which makes me question both whether that is an actual vulnerability (Signal, the messenger recommended by the author, also didn't have that check, and it's addition is absent from release notes and CVEs)

I've edited the above linked post several times to make this clearer, but people still keep linking Matrix's flawed response as if it actually addressed the issue. It does not.

The issue is not as simple as "did the check exist? [y/n]". There are actually two issues:

1. Did the check exist? [y/n]

2. Did the group key agreement protocol fall to shit if the check was omitted? [y/n]

Matrix was (n, y) due to how Megolm manages keys in group contexts. Signal was (n, n) due to their protocol design.

Matrix tried to defend point 1 when the blog post was about both 1 and 2.

(Post-Quantum MLS, for comparison, would also have been impervious to this issue due to how KEMs work. Another point in favor of MLS adoption.)

> and whether the post was made in good faith (the check was added to libsignal on the same day that the author disclosed the vulnerability to Matrix, which can be a coincidence, but doesn't seem likely given that the code has been there for years).

Even if you assume the worst possible interpretation of this coincidence (which, sure, you're free to if you want-- you would be wrong if you did, of course): What does it even matter?

Like, what is the notion of "good faith" that's even necessary for someone to do independent security research and publish criticism of the cryptography used by a software project that's being propped up by EU sovereignty movements?

In my opinion, this is a stupid and vacuous framing.

Signal omitting the check didn't harm Signal's confidentiality. Matrix omitting the check demonstrably did.

---

Also, if you're going to decry my blog post for not enumerating unrelated security bugs (n.b., the blog post was about Matrix, not Signal, so why would I talk about Signal's code in that post???), be aware that I reported non-cryptographic bugs to Element (Matrix client) and Conversations (XMPP client) around the same time. Only XMPP actually credited me with any fixes.

https://gultsch.social/@daniel/116125064866469085

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.

> 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.

Eternal September: AI edition

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

also known as the good old days

Some weeks ago, a colleague laughed at me when I asked: "btw, do we use jQuery somewhere in our web app?" - he said, its no more a thing today.

Is that true?

(Im out of webdev for years)

jQuery is certainly still used in a lot of production apps and they still release updates.

But most new web apps will use a flavor of React.

I bet half the devs who say 'we don't use it', probably have it on their site and don't realize it.

Usenet is still here. I'm using it on a regular basis. The point is very few others are.

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

"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.

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.

I joined in 2008, that was even after lurking for a while, and it’s almost unrecognizable now in comparison has been for many years. Was mostly entrepreneurship, tech was present but was a means to an end. It wasn’t tech for the sake of tech, which is what it feels like in the recent past. The discussion on entrepreneurship topics seems to have an employee mindset more so than an owner mindset. I find it similar to how renters vilify landlords but being a landlord is not massively glamorous and can be quite risky, renters are generally out of touch with the costs involved and the profit of a landlord is all I’m saying. There’s definitely some shitty landlords tarnishing the reputation of them all. This is what has happened in tech too, the startups we loved turned evil. My gut reaction of any new tech product is no longer curiosity, it’s mistrust.

Anyhow - I find tech stuff interesting to a degree, but fundamentally I’m an entrepreneur that sees it as a tool. A means to an end. And I would love to find a place that still has that vibe. But anywhere entrepreneur related is always a cesspool of grift so it’s hard to find.

I specifically remember there being a similar complaint about bitcoin back in the day, and I think somebody even SHOW HN-ed an HN front page without news about bitcoin (I went searching but failed... instead I found these two ASK HNs: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20385116 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5601876).

As for the employee-vs-employer. I am for sure part of the problem there. When I joined I immediately saw the potential of this being a forum where tech workers can form an international solidarity and complain about our bosses and started using it as such. There is no way you can have that many workers in an industry together and we don‘t complain about our bosses, that is just not going to happen. Workers complaining about our bosses is a universal behavior.

I am part of the problem in the first. It's because early HNer's were early Bitcoin users and adopters and I feel we (I) had a hope that it could take hold as an actual currency (I no longer feel that). But, we were so early I can say my first Bitcoin purchase was for <$10 and most of the Bitcoin I own today has a cost basis <$30. For us, it's climb was fast, wild, and wealth inducing. I thought it was insane when it quickly went to $100 and I think one of my own HN posts that has been maybe my most upvoted ever was about it hitting $300. I often wonder how many of the bitcoin wealth you hear and see about IRL, were just HN users that heard about it's early traction and had enough curiosity to buy a few coins (a cup of coffee then, is worth a house now). It was a PITA to buy coins though, I luckily used Mt Gox and moved them out prior to them getting "hacked".

I put my Bitcoin on ice, refused to sell it, my initial investment thesis was "what happens to the price when all Bitcoin is mined", given the supply is fixed, the price should surge, was my thought. I think they have or will find a way to alter the algo so that even more can be mined. But once I made that decision, it became difficult to see all the Bitcoin related news. I wanted to just not think about it. Daily reminder that I could sell today at a crazy high gain is tempting. I don't even know if that thesis makes sense given the projection of when that last coin will mine. Those projections didn't exist when I put this into place. So I hodl for no reason probably.

In terms of the posting and ethos, it was really all the non-Bitcoin crypto crap that came afterwards that I got super tired of. But I am older and know it was just the current hype cycle, just like AI today, something else will come tomorrow. Although AI is kind of a big one, it's both massively hyped and useful too. It's also moving faster than I can keep up with, so I just learn to dabble where I have interest. I'm not trying to be a creator of AI or start an AI startup, it's just tinkering and when it comes to tech as a means to an end, it allows me to move faster. But it's also given everyone my superpower. Kind of a net zero with extra steps. It feels like my beloved woodworking hobby has been changed to IKEA furniture assembly which is not fun at all.

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