It's not about the effects, it's about the drive and the feel. A new place, alien and exciting, and you knew, you suspected, you had no idea what could happen there. The things you did, the community you found, all very pure, like thinking code for three days straight. You'd cut your identity down to six characters or so. You could earn your stay, picking off a national company, with the cheapest of your tools. It's not about the effects, yet now you look back and see a petty thief.

Now, the land is settled, everyone and their grandchildren are here, skyscrapers everywhere. You talk to everyone here, you talk business. You use your name - why wouldn't you? Once almost everywhere had the feel. Now, we look for its analogue in dead musicians, business, pleasure - dressed in not-suits, slurping whole-grain ramen, in our exclusive club, HN, no memes allowed.

Like noname123, I'm not sure if I'm doing justice. I think my point is that it's not about what people accomplish. Great and not-so-great people have been doing amazing things for a while now. Once, though, there was a place that seemed to force you to drop that extra crap - your name, your latest grab for cash, your ego. Usenet before the Eternal September, programming before dot-com, the internet before social networking. Now everyone's here, no effort, no stigma, business as usual.

It's not our fault, we didn't mess this up. It's just what happens, after a while. That frontier feel isn't dead though - it's just waiting for us to start going up into space, filtering reality through wearables, hooking circuits into our heads.