I guess I don't really agree; HN of several years ago typically had much briefer and less "weighty" articles and discussion than r/truereddit, and a lot more offhand stuff, like the typical techcrunch stories, and "here's how you do a thing in vim" type quick-tip articles. Certainly some good, in-depth technical articles and discussions, but that's the case now too. I've been digging through archives to try to remind myself of whether I had missed some sort of golden age (I was a lurker then, and considered it an interesting but not amazing site), and I still don't really see the golden-ageness, even in retrospect. Nothing like the Kuro5hin golden age, anyway. ;-)
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.
Having never heard of Kuro5hin, I decided to google it. If it ever had a golden age, it must have fallen far. The current front page reads like a mix of 4chan, freerepublic, and the occasional tidbit of interesting content.
Seriously, a selection of headlines:
"OFFICIAL NOTICE: SITE CLOSED DUE TO AIDS"
"Judiciary Abdicated. Republic Dead. All Hail Emperor Obama"
"The New York Times Editorial Board Should Be Executed For Treason"
It's sort of a dive bar these days; a surprising proportion of the good posters are still there, but they just post different things, while they post "serious" stuff on their blogs or somewhere else. Most discussion goes on in the diaries (which are also dive-bar-ish, mixture of serious and unserious chat), while the front-page is a bit of an active joke. Hasn't had much serious content in probably 3-4 years, with the occasional exception.
(Actually that's a strangely common thing on the internet; the offensive-joker and troll types sometimes are the same people as the good-technical-content types. For example, the Rands of http://www.randsinrepose.com is also the Rands of http://www.jerkcity.com.)
I've posted this on HN before, but I wrote a long article about the decline of online community, which includes some retrospective about k5's decline as well: http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2009/3/12/33338/3000
