In the early days of the internet, there was definitely a different crowd because the barrier to entry was pretty high and required a lot of dedication and problem-solving abilities. As the bar of entry came down, along with it came all of the things that come with football stadiums, shopping malls, and time-share condos.
A more recent, similar event was when Digg shut down and all the users from there flooded onto Reddit. That was the beginning of the end of the golden days of Reddit, imo.
Why?
> what is currently purported to be the 'golden age'
My guess is that we’re on it right now.
Once something is past this 'recency' window, we may want to start looking into additional examples more reflective of current times. That is not to say the Digg exodus is an insignificant event, but that there have been a fair few exodi since--StackExchange, Twitter's infosec sphere, streamers between YouTube/Twitch, Snap/Tiktok, failed SVOD services.
HN might be one of the lucky few around.
[1]: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-018-0474-5
[2]: https://www.theverge.com/2021/5/21/22447690/link-rot-researc...
The internet is useful when you need some specific knowledge. It is useless when you need nothing and are just browsing. Sitting there watching TikTok videos or reading hackernews is usually going to turn out to be a waste of time.
A generous interpretation is that users are expected to take the knowledge and do greater things with it, instead of sitting and clicking, but that obviously doesn't make sense after a few seconds' thought. I'm stumped.