> How much of what you list has been "democratized"? Apart from the forum, and probably the browser, nothing

Depends on what you mean by "democratized". It's surely at least as "democratized" as LLM access is, and that was the base line in this discussion. Probably meaning "everybody can use it for not-insane-money instead of just a small elite". (I don't necessarily agree with that notion, but at least we should use the same standards for things.)

> And both of those things are of questionable goodness to humanity.

If you think HN is bad for humanity, why do you participate? I can immediately list 100 things that are worse for humanity. Same thing with your browser.