Reading those comments make me wish that I had known about this site back in 2007, back when graham responded to comments about his essays or when now-famous founders browsed as well [1].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35095 (Same thread btw.)

Crazy to look back at that exchange between him and Drew Houston knowing what we know today about the success of Dropbox (which hadn't even launched at the time of that comment!).

It's easy to look back at the "good old days" with the benefit of hindsight, but I'm sure that even today many of the famous founders of tomorrow can be found commenting here on HN. We just don't know who they are yet.

There are a lot of redundancy in themes, but I didn't notice a decreasing in quality of the discussion. The good now days are perfect to me.

It really is amazing, I've been here nearly 12 years now and the quality of discussion hasn't devolved. If anything, it was a bit more cynical/negative ten years ago than it is now.

I feel like there are more brief and superfluous comments than there are used to be, but just as many or more lengthy and substantial comments.

Your comment gave me an interesting idea. What would happen if we imposed a minimum char-limit for say, hacker news comments? On one hand I'd expect more descriptive responses, fewer comments that are a short "Your wrong but I won't tell you why", etc. Comments just spamming letters would be fairly easy to detect.

On the other hand what would this minimum char/word length be? Even your comment is fairly short, but it's descriptive and fully communicates your point...

Then you end up with comments like you find on leasehackr.com, which has a twenty character minimum: “Agreed. 202020202020”

I believe there is a minimum character length under which comments are printed in a smaller font. I’m sure the mods have some insight into this.

Huh. I've only been here a couple of years, and I feel the quality of discussion is already starting to worsen. (However, it's still better than most other things—see https://danluu.com/hn-comments/)

How did I guess this was going to show up...

What a great rabbit hole down which you sent me! Thanks!

Drew Houston even replied to one of his comments in that thread suggesting possible collaboration, and this was while Dropbox was going through the Summer '07 YC program, before they had even launched.

Crazy to look back and see how things panned out for these two random internet commenters.

That's the first one I thought of too. :)

(Oh my, I recall reading that roughly in real time when Colin wrote it, can't believe that was 2007 already!)