alt Hacker NewsNo. Exact opposite. Opening it up to everyone is what kills everything good, the endless september of grocery store tabloid aisles and clickbait. Gatekeepers are good, restrictions on participation are good. The internet was better when it was a self selecting place for interesting interested people and not the global walmart.
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This is the way! There _has_ to be friction when getting access or the uneducated hordes of the internet will spoil it. I only use mailinglists and fediblocked instances for "social" media. Mainstream mastodon is useless and just a bad parody of x or fb.
Mailinglists are great, because more and more people do no longer know how to use email or follow the instructions to sign up for a mailinglist, so many interesting people tend to gather around the lists.
Eh, I feel like the issue with this logic is that being technically savvy and having interesting things to say aren't really that heavily correlated. Plenty of people are incredibly knowledgeable about non-technical fields and have tons of things they could say about them, but aren't technical enough to setup a website (or in many cases, edit videos/run a YouTube channel/etc either).
Meanwhile there are also plenty of tech folks that have zero empathy or interest in quality that can easily get past any technical barrier you put in front of them, like the more talented folks at companies like Anthropic or Meta.
Making things difficult to set up tech wise doesn't select for intelligence or skill or creativity, it selects for people that work in tech as their day job.
"Bad roads act as filters", Joseph Wood Krutch, 1967.
<https://wist.info/krutch-joseph-wood/53557/>