[bigiain]

> It’s not proprietary.

Yeah. I was being snarky without enough context to make myself clear there... Sorry.

> Usenet is flooded with spam to the point of being unusable,

What mechanisms do you see in place to stop this being an inevitable result for Minichan as well? It's a social problem not a technical one...

> With a decently sized crowd from HN, there could be a lot of interesting content on a Minichan like site.

Maybe. pg's recent comment about the amount of time and effort it has taken to curate this community into some semblance of civility suggest even "we, the magnificent HM community" are subject to the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory as well... (I've had a few "bad days" and needed pulling into line by dang or others over the years...)

> Imagine an imageboard with people from HN

From what pg says, that'll most likely end up closer to 4Chan that HN - without several people in full time (well paid) roles who's job description includes community management/moderation (and who are good at it).

HN is a magical place _only_ because YC values it enough to have people like pg and dang and scott spend as vast chunk of their paid time making it this way. Those of us who benefit from this place owe a debt to pg's vision and YC's commitment, and are lucky it was founded by someone like pg instead of moot. (And at the same time, people who benefit from 4Chan owe similar thanks for diametrically opposed visions there.)

[65536]

These are good points and I think you are right. I just wish it was possible for such a dream place like I wish for to exist.

[bigiain]

I think they _do_ exist. Transiently and briefly.

For me, they recur maybe once every 5-10 years or so and last about the same sort of time period?? Here since 2009. Twitter circa 2008 or so. Burningman in the early 2000s. ASR on usenet in the late '90s

Things change, they run their course - and I change and the things I want become different. Some people rant and demand things "go back the way they were", but by then the people who made it "the way things were" have moved on to a new thing, and new people have grown up and started building new things they think are better than the old people had.

Hold on to your dream, but realise that you may have to either chase it around the internet as it moves (and work out how to find it when you one day wake up are realise it's gone from the old place), or make it yourself as part of a team prepared to put in the hard work required to shape it the way you think is right.

(While I personally think 4Chan is a total shit show, I have no doubt moot invested enormous effort in making it or helping it become what _he_ wanted in the world. A whole different sort of effort than pg/deng/scott/YC/others put in here, but I have no doubt moot complained bitterly to his friends how hard it was dealing with things like lawyers and hosting companies and all the other things that become a problem when you decide you need to make a thing like 4Cahn exists in the world...)