I sort of agree, but I meant it a bit tongue-in-cheek (hence the smiley). I'm sure plenty of people would argue that the Kuro5hin golden age was nothing like the WELL golden age, or the Usenet golden age, or various other possibilities.
One thing I did like about the Kuro5hin model was discussion organized around original, substantive stories, written by the same userbase who were the commenters. That, and stories posted at a rate of one or two a day. Sites like Slashdot/HN/reddit are instead mainly based around discussing offsite links, which K5 allowed but sort of discouraged as "mindless link propagation" (there was a section for it, but people didn't want too many submissions to it, and you typically had to add some substantive commentary to the link to get the submission accepted). The articles were also directly written for / targeted to the K5 community. People do sometimes write blog posts specifically to target HN, but they're often more multitargeted--- stuff submitted here might not be written with an HN audience in mind at all, or HN might only be one of several intended audiences.
Some classic Usenet groups were sort-of in that style as well. You could start a new thread with a one-line post or "what do you think of this?" query, but some groups had a culture of starting new threads only when you had a significant, well-thought out post to make; otherwise you were supposed to stick to existing threads.
I'm afraid it's harder to attract good content to a community these days, though. The people who used to consistently write good stuff for Kuro5hin now have their own blogs, and post their content there instead. In the early 2000s, it was a win-win situation: Kuro5hin provided an outlet for people who had things to say, and people who had things to say provided interesting content to read and discuss. These days if you have something compelling to say, you can just start a blog, and then try to get readers by submitting links across the web.
One thing I did like about the Kuro5hin model was discussion organized around original, substantive stories, written by the same userbase who were the commenters. That, and stories posted at a rate of one or two a day. Sites like Slashdot/HN/reddit are instead mainly based around discussing offsite links, which K5 allowed but sort of discouraged as "mindless link propagation" (there was a section for it, but people didn't want too many submissions to it, and you typically had to add some substantive commentary to the link to get the submission accepted). The articles were also directly written for / targeted to the K5 community. People do sometimes write blog posts specifically to target HN, but they're often more multitargeted--- stuff submitted here might not be written with an HN audience in mind at all, or HN might only be one of several intended audiences.
Some classic Usenet groups were sort-of in that style as well. You could start a new thread with a one-line post or "what do you think of this?" query, but some groups had a culture of starting new threads only when you had a significant, well-thought out post to make; otherwise you were supposed to stick to existing threads.
I'm afraid it's harder to attract good content to a community these days, though. The people who used to consistently write good stuff for Kuro5hin now have their own blogs, and post their content there instead. In the early 2000s, it was a win-win situation: Kuro5hin provided an outlet for people who had things to say, and people who had things to say provided interesting content to read and discuss. These days if you have something compelling to say, you can just start a blog, and then try to get readers by submitting links across the web.