Nope. We're here. You and me. You wrote a thoughtful comment, and now we're having a conversation about it. We, two people who have never met (so far as I know). This right here is about what we had when we said "The web was wonderful. The internet was so full of promise."

Now, true, much of the web turned into ads/corporate/shill/propaganda. And it takes dang being superhuman to keep this place from being overrun. So the larger battle may be lost.

But I think The Cluetrain Manifesto still had (and has) a fairly good point. We want the human voice on the internet, even if the corporations give us corporate-speak. (We want it even more now, with Covid having reduced the amount of in-person interaction.) We want the human touch. Corporations found that they could extract more money from us by other approaches, but we humans still want human interaction. And, I think, that's part of the charm of HN. It's mostly human talk rather than talking points or corporate-speak. (That's part of why people just repeating talking points feels so jarring here - it's out of place.)

So I think there are still pockets of what made the web so wonderful back in the day. It's not the majority any more, but there is still a fair amount of it around, if you look for it.