Comment by boplicity

Many of those things are still there. I've run an old-school style forum since 2009, and it is still going strong. Many of the people using it are very different than the HN crowd: non-tech savvy, relatively old, mostly women relatively low-income. The design has barely changed since it was first created, though I've incrementally added useful features (and not useful features) specifically geared towards helping the community.