/. was another world, one that I miss sometimes. I'm probably viewing it through rose-tinted nostalgia, but I don't remember the vitriol and hatred that so many social sites are soaked in these days.

The Mozilla open source announcement, the Microsoft anti-trust case, Linux exploding in popularity, it all felt like we were changing the world for the better.

/. was great... and then it wasn't. The troll population went way up, the "first post" thing was just noise, and eventually I just quit going there.

HN is also less than it used to be, but I think that the mods have kept it better than /. became - so far, at least.