[startedYearsAgo]

You aren't imagining things. Pseudonymous and anonymous channels have actually been lagging behind the large walled garden corporate social media platforms for about two years now. Maybe more.

It used to be that the unfiltered image boards were at the forefront of emerging trends and defining or producing cultural shifts.

What happened is that the sheer volume of the walled gardens has grown each year as older people who know better have aged out. The replacements from younger age brackets are all piling into corporate social platforms. Kids have developed tactics to deal with close quarter snooping from parents and immediate authority figures.

Large platforms now inflate as the volume of internet users drains out of participating with offbeat services.

Also Trump and the alt-right have had chilling effects of the reputation of using random websites and anonymous participation. It now feels very wrong to more people. Whereas previously it felt neither right nor wrong to lurk as a spectator and cheer or boo as desired.

This affects places like HN which will become stale as younger users gloss over the glory of koans about the AI lab that never really produced AI.

HN activity will decay even if money will keep HN alive as a startup investor corner. But the winds are blowing. Kids aren't leaving corporate platforms as predicted. They don't know how create competitors or whether that's possible.