HN reminds me of the early days of Slashdot - news before it breaks elsewhere, a good-natured and interesting community, me karma-whoring when I should be working... :)
Something I strongly appreciate about HN is self promotional posts are honest about self identifying as advertisements. Hey HN look what I made...
Also /. appeared to have, formally or informally, scheduled topics if nothing is going on then its time to post the (paid for?) 3 articles per week about e-ink, or now its time for the daily apple article, etc. So for anyone other than noobs you had to filter them out. There are topics repeated on HN but at least they're random-ish and not apparently off a strict calendar. Hmm... pageviews down today, time to post a BSD/GPL flamewar to stoke the fires, etc.
It probably was a bigger deal, but it was also a very different time. The Internet has now been swallowed by mainstream ideology and corporate culture, so it's not really possible to compare the two.
