Subscribe or comment?? Im in the target market for this. Nothing puts me off doing something than the S word, though forums are fucked due to LLMs and bots, so that option is out. The only way anything like this can work is invite only, with each referrer responsible for invite tree. Your community needs to be good enough that loosing access encourages goid behaviour. This works exceedingly well for certain communities online...

Use an OG forum software that's good and powered some of the classic forums of the time. Make it stylishly retro.

Definitely. Honestly I was going to write a custom forum in the style of those perl bboards but with https://90s.dev aesthetics (the website, not the os).

But maybe first and foremost I need a mailing list so people can be notified of things like this when they're announced/released?

I'm interested. I don't think it should just be an older coders club though. It should be for anyone of any age that's into the craft of fine, well built software, and who wants to learn from people who have been into it a long time.

I also like /r/tinycode for its spirit. My #1 saying in coding is "simplicity is harder than complexity." It's gone downhill like the rest of Reddit though.

I'm also not totally anti-AI. I use it a little bit. I just think if you aren't a good developer you aren't competent to use it properly. It's like saying autocomplete will make a bad developer good. I think it's like super autocomplete. Also found it useful for "here's a big block of code, explain it" -- you have to check what it tells you of course, but it gives you a passable first pass analysis, like asking a junior dev to do that.

> My #1 saying in coding is "simplicity is harder than complexity."

That's a great way of putting what I've been thinking for a few years now. It's the same reason I designed https://immaculata.dev so differently than Vite. Sure I could throw a ton of code at the problem, but carefully solving the problem correctly is both simpler and harder.

> It's gone downhill like the rest of Reddit though.

Exactly, which is part of the charm of HN. I want to capture that for 90s.dev but focused solely on software skill cultivation (and sharing the wonder and beauty and joy of writing software in the 90s) rather than the topic-soup of HN.

Yeah it wouldn't be age-based. It would be 90s-themed, but the focus would entirely be on the cultivating the craft itself.

To clarify the AI stance, I meant it in the context of the article: it would encourage cultivating our skills so it both grows and doesn't atrophy.