HN was a great place back then. I made many useful professional contacts, and had a lot of interesting and deep conversations. It was like (site that shall not be named) is today, except with a bit more focus on turning the tech into a business.

There were some subtle shifts, as front page posts started being more for people who think startups are cool, and less for people who want to figure out how to make their startup win. Then there was a big shift, as diggers fled to reddit, and redditors came to HN.

Now, HN is comparatively useless.

Little silly how? They literally provide no information about their changes. How many phones do you think they were forced onto? I guarantee you a majority of their subscribers are soon to join their OS providers native file sharing service, and for good reason. Google Drive provides an entire online application stack for third-party developers and a simple API. Google Photos is great as well, as it has the best object and face recognition software.

OneDrive actually does the same pretty well too, and integrates with their native Office Suite. There is really not a good reason to select Dropbox at this point, unless you are just working PR for them.