Ultimately the worst situation is when replies can consist of only a “joke” or meme (worst of all… a gif). Discussion is destroyed and instead replaced with a delta function; a single impulse response. “Click and move on”.
Usenet was also niche and technical in the beginning, but that changed over time. Maybe the answer is multifaceted; Hacker News is a bit ugly, has a large percentage of technical users, strong moderation and lack of "low effort" features such as inline images, GIF libraries, reactions etc.
However, there is another part of me that is glad this new Internet is so much more accessable. Don't get me wrong, I abhor the pervasive marketing, corporate fingers in everyrhing, and all the bloat that comes with it, but if I just focus on the fact that so many more people are even getting a mild, watered-down taste of why I love computers so much, that makes me a bit happy. Computers connect us, and during a crucial time in my life where I was feeling woefully disconnect from my peers (socially excluded, perhaps?) the BBS and newsgroup communities were there to welcome me.
My hope was that wireless mesh networks would fill that void since you have to be physically local to the network to gain access. We could have local/community level LANs with file sharing, gaming, chat, and forums. Instead we got things like facebook groups and Nextdoor.
Ignoring the hellthreads, the technical content here is pretty mid these days. The last year has been rough on this site. It's like reading a combination of r/linux and r/rust, a sort of nuance free assertion of FOSS-heavy technical preferences. If that's the echo chamber that you enjoy go for it, but even on Matrix I find a lot deeper content than here, let alone some Discords and smaller forums. What I do appreciate is the breadth on some more niche technical content (J and APL threads come to mind.) But IMO the glory days here are gone.
Social forums seem to "collapse" a few ways: die (like Usenet, many old IRC channels), calcify (many older forums I'm in, Lobsters), or become an echo chamber (Subreddits, this place.) I guess Eternal September comes for us all.
Talking of high barrier to entry, does anyone ever remember that hackers group that said you needed to hack something in your newsreader to make it not read-only so you could post?
I expect there were other groups that needed an Approved: header to post.
I made an account around the time when I started reading HN for the first time. I was a master student in computer science. Other than the reason to be able to create things out of my imagination, another reason why I studied computer science is because I felt too dumb to grok the field. So it was me stretching myself out of my academic comfort zone since I felt I'd never be able to grok programming. I cannot describe how heavy of a pressure I put on myself. How would you feel if what you're trying to attempt is almost certainly futile? The only counter argument I had is that I knew that humans (myself included) are notoriously difficult at predicting someone's capability. In the master computer science, I was scraping by at that point.
When I found HN, it felt quite inaccessible to be honest. It felt too geeky, too technical. I was able to stay around was because of the broad curiosity in all kinds of topics. A related reason was that curiosity is the main virtue that HN stands for, which is the same virtue I've stood for since I was 7 years old. I remember reading all the non-technical submissions for a few months while once or twice per week reading an actual technical submission.
Mind you, I had enough training, I took my computer science master over the course of multiple years (while also doing a bachelor in psych and a master in game-design, simultaneously). And yet, I could only bare 1 or 2 technical articles per day.
It took a whole year of acclimation. After a year, HN felt fully accessible. I could enjoy any submission on there. In part, what really helped was that I took very very hard computer science courses and that gave me an intellectual development that has been unprecedented ever since. After that, HN felt like home.
But for that whole year, it was interesting but it also felt like a strain on my mind every day.
So to say that HN does not have a high barrier of entry, I'd respectfully disagree. I don't think I'd be able to have enjoyed this place if I wouldn't have studied computer science. I know there are non-technical people on here that are able to do that. I know that I simply wouldn't, and I think there are others like me that couldn't have either.
But honestly I can't say excessive discussion of subjects I have no real interest in is the reason I avoid most online discussion forms (incl. social media). An HN thread about a Kardashian is probably still likely to be more interesting than your average FB (or Twi..., sorry "the site formerly known as an X symbol") comment thread about topics I'm genuinely invested in.
Something works, culturally, in 1970s place X, and doesn't in 2020s place Y.
Wikipedia, started today, would not be Wikipedia for every reason. Different user culture, different founder culture, finance culture, IP, "truth," etc. Wikipedia started in today's world would start different, go on a different trajectory...
We have an intuitive grasp of this, and are always looking for a more objective/formal/causal understanding... but I don't think it really exists.
In any case, just like with "music these days," and whatnot... sometimes the thing that has changed is you yourself.
BBSs kind of served as a filtering device for finding other people like you. In a small town, it was easy to feel isolated and lonely for being a nerd, but then you find this community of other nerds!
It was great and I don't know the equivalent nowadays.
I played around with FidoNet back in the late 1980s/early 90s, when Usenet was not available to me, and FidoNet's Usenet-like echomail system had some very active groups. But even with FidoNet, there was very much a local-to-regional focus. Networks were organized geographically, and Net 115 (Chicago area) had some social gatherings. But FidoNet collapsed pretty quickly once the internet came to the public.
CW (Morse), RTTY (Teletype), etc, etc.
I think that one good thing from these services was the relatively high barrier of entry. Today, online services are all about low friction signup, which makes a lot of sense in the highly competitive Internet of 2023. But when computers were somewhat niche and you really had to figure out how to get things working, users were a lot more committed and thus the quality of discussions was a lot higher.
Interestingly, Hacker News has a fairly low barrier of entry and high quality discussions. Maybe because it's kind of ugly and scares away the average user expecting animated prompts and fancy style sheets.
Speaking of BBSs, there is nothing today that quite captures the full value proposition of BSSs. Back in the day, you could sign up to one of them and meet a lot of locals due to the high long distance phone bills. I made a lot of "real world" friends, even a girlfriend or two, back in the BBS days.