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Ask HN: Alternative HN-Like Communities?

175 points by pmohun 8y ago

I've bounced around my fair share of online forums since ~2006. Inevitably, a shift in culture/moderation/interests with cause me to seek out new communities. HN has been fairly consistent in it's discussion since I've joined, and I'd like to find some similar sites.

e1ven 8y ago
Obviously Reddit, particularly r/programming Slashdot.org is still around Metafilter.org is still going http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/ http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/ https://blog.tildes.net/announcing-tildes https://blog.tildes.net/announcing-tildes https://lobste.rs/ https://lobste.rs/
- DarmokJalad1701 8y ago
  Any way to get invites? :)
  - CodeXs 8y ago
    Same :)
  - aboutruby 8y ago
    The idea is to have a vetted word of mouth so the legitimate way is to personally know someone who has been invited there.
- charlesism 8y ago
  The page announcing Tildes looks really promising. Any idea how large the user base is, so far?
  - Deimorz 8y ago
    There are about 8500 users registered in total. Activity fluctuates a bit, but lately it's pretty normal to have about 30 new topics posted every day, and a few hundred comments between them.
- anonytrary 8y ago
  I would advise against sorting by new on /r/programming. It's constantly bombarded with low quality content and people spamming low-quality tutorials and homework problems/solutions. /r/programming has something of an identity crisis.
- Markoff 8y ago
  is there a way to display Slashdot just with headlines or with some simple introduction without full stories on mobile? it takes tons of scrolling to check what's interesting
  - Markoff 8y ago
    https://slashdot.org/archive.pl https://slashdot.org/archive.pl since nobody helped, it's the closest you get, surprisingly there are much less wrappers for Slashdot than HN
- nichos 8y ago
  Lobsters is a really good site. The invite setup they have has been keeping the quality good, but they need a better way to get them out. I've been a lurker for a while now since they don't have a queue type system.
newsbinator 8y ago
I've been enjoying the Alpha of https://Tildes.net https://Tildes.net It's like Reddit for thoughtful content, no fluff. And so far it's full of hackers and people who think like hackers. Email the founder for an invite code. He's friendly and engaged.
- modzu 8y ago
  anybody know of communities that dont excessively moderate or censor? tildes looks interesting but the founder says, "it will also never be described as anything like "an absolute free speech site". i would love to find a community that moderates harrassment, actual hate speech, and threats, but nothing else. for example ive seen comments deleted here on hn related to drug culture, presumably because a drug is illegal in the usa. in other words, a community interested in truth, no matter how messy it is.
  - berberous 8y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gab_(social_network) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gab_(social_network) The founder was kicked out of YC. I've never actually read it, since its insistence on "absolute free speech" just causes it to be overrun by the worst users that no other service wants.
  - intertextuality 8y ago
    Normally I would agree with you, but websites that describe themselves as “absolute free speech” usually attract assholes. It sounds like tilde here is just being honest. They likely do minimal moderation.
    - 8note 8y ago
      i think that's usually "good moderation is expensive, and we can't afford it"
  - 8note 8y ago
    I think this is a good description of why an absolute free speech site will never flourish: https://youtu.be/r3snVCRo_bI https://youtu.be/r3snVCRo_bI what you describe is basically just Reddit, but with the people nobody wants to talk to on Reddit ... so mostly just the people you don't want to talk to on Reddit talking to each other,which has no mass appeal
lainon 8y ago
Does StackExchange count? It's been constant quality since it's existence
- ykevinator 8y ago
  Stack exchange is awful. The moderators power has gone to their heads.
  - sattoshi 8y ago
    Why do you say this?
    - _pmf_ 8y ago
      The most interesting questions (which made StackOverflow awesome in the past would be swiftly closed today because they are not specific enough or are highly opinionated. They are free to do so, of course, but it's a bit sad.
- fxfan 8y ago
  It's absolutely amazing for reading and learning. But if you have a question - then it has to have an objective answer.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
jammygit 8y ago
I meant to ask this myself. Maybe I'm just scared hn will go away one day and I won't have somewhere else to go I found mewe has a couple of good groups. They're a bit small, but some really smart, nice people in them
sureaboutthis 8y ago
I'm not kidding. I just came here from writing, elsewhere, about this very topic and mentioned that I thought HN has drifted--liberal, left leaning--over the years but not as bad as most and doesn't seem to have as many posts by kid pretenders.
- callekabo 8y ago
  Agree, there's clearly more left-leaning stuff on here than other positions.
muvek 8y ago
Prismo (https://prismo.news/ https://prismo.news/) will soon be opened to the public as far as I know. Code is on gitlab: https://gitlab.com/mbajur/prismo/ https://gitlab.com/mbajur/prismo/ It is a project I've been following and seems pretty interesting. A federated reddit alternative, part of the fediverse.
qznc 8y ago
https://www.laarc.io/ https://www.laarc.io/ "laarc is a tech mashup of Hacker News and Reddit by two long time fans of both forums. The initial impetus behind the site is a desire to try to recapture the early spirit of Hacker News. HN currently has about 5 million visitors a month. It's different than it was back in the day when it was a much smaller group of people. We're aiming for a cross between Pinboard and HN: a central place for all your bookmarks, with the ability to make private submissions. (pg mentioned that he used HN for all of YC's internal software in the early days; it's handy to have a place to keep all of your notes!)"
- modzu 8y ago
  so what differentiates it from hn? it looks much like a clone to me
  - DoreenMichele 8y ago
    It's going to fundamentally be a different group of people and that will make it different. Some technical differences: It uses tags to try to categorize stuff somewhat. Unlike on HN, your threads page also has links to your posts, a feature I requested probably at a point where it was basically me and the guy coding it up kicking around ideas for a forum. It's grown substantially in a short period of time, but it's still very new and if you want to shape a forum into a place with the kinds of discussion that interests you, it's an opportunity to do that.
    - krapp 8y ago
      >It's going to fundamentally be a different group of people and that will make it different. Isn't it literally just HN users who know about it from here and the Arc forum?
      - deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
      - deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
reilly3000 8y ago
I'm working on developing a new community (currently in stealth mode) associated with a well-known publication. Please let me know what you would like in a community forum (Discourse based). We're #deplatforming and want to make a place where great discussions happen.
- danvayn 8y ago
  The discourse community is in desperate need of more plugin development I think. Maybe your forum can foster some discussion on plugins or some in a subcategory or something. Alternatively, it could be a subcategory to specifically discuss discourse, as I feel like there could probably be more places to do that. I just think discussion on discourse is probably shut down a little quickly on the actual forum and that organic discussion from HN-type posters might lead to something that could benefit discourse admins who are interested in more, I guess you could say creative? uses for discourse. Theres just a big hole where bots and category customization and feature toggling could be, and I feel like Im probably not the only discourse admin who thinks that.
  - mk4p 8y ago
    Curious about this - could you give some detail about what would be useful? Not a huge discourse user myself... (I can be reached at mk@{my-hn-username}.com
rambojazz 8y ago
reddit (some), lobste.rs, voat, freepo.st
- ausbah 8y ago
  voat is a dumpster fire full of nothing but racists, conspiracy nutjobs, and people with less than desirable views
fghtr 8y ago
https://habr.com/en/ https://habr.com/en/ Russian hacker community; this year they started an English version of the website (announcement: https://habr.com/en/company/tm/blog/435764/ https://habr.com/en/company/tm/blog/435764/).
rurban 8y ago
Quora, at least better than Stackexchange.
- sattoshi 8y ago
  Quora is pretty terrible. Loaded or stupid questions answered by some pretentious book seller.
tnolet 8y ago
On Reddit, the /devops sub is pretty good. Very low fluff, no link spamming. Very different from the overrun /webdev or /programming.
- jcims 8y ago
  100k subscribers seems to be the point, more or less, where the community aspects of a subreddit starts to go downhill. If you can avoid/unsubscribe those, it can be a decent place. Also, tacking /comments on to your subreddit url will show the most recent comments. This is pretty handy for finding the conversations in otherwise slow subreddits.
juststeve 8y ago
Time to build one
throg 8y ago
/prog/
bitdeep 8y ago
For Nomads and Travelling: https://nomadlist.com/forum/ https://nomadlist.com/forum/ For Low Level Geeks: https://lobste.rs/ https://lobste.rs/
charliebrownau 8y ago
It seems in 2010-2020 that "hate speech" is anything that the Global Socialist LEFT hates or disagrees with - Eg Gender based on birth biology/DNA/reality , not feelings - Feminism is socialism - Facts are not racist - Antifa are the real thugs and fascists In the end we will end up with SEGREGATION and two groups * The offended LEFT * and normal people that treat everyone as individuals and dont get offended over the truth
thrilleratplay 8y ago
These are much smaller communities but not a lot of discussion in them. https://www.echojs.com https://www.echojs.com - HN for Javascript http://www.datatau.com http://www.datatau.com - HN for data science.
dhruvkar 8y ago
https://www.spane.org https://www.spane.org It's a fledgling community for social entrepreneurs. (full disclosure: I started the site). It has yet to gain traction, but HN is what prompted me start this in the social impact space.
m33k44 8y ago
Just few weeks ago I started a Slack workspace mvphacks.slack.com for all developers working on their MVPs, or developers who want to join with other developers to build their ideas together. The aim is to allow developers to create their own channel for the project they are working on. The developers can then post about their project or idea under the "general" channel to invite others to their channel for participating in their project or idea. Here is the invite: https://tinyurl.com/ybongxl2 https://tinyurl.com/ybongxl2 in case you want to join.
rinze 8y ago
For me, the best discussions lately have always happened in mailing lists, where there are no points system and patrons ignore useless threads.
qnsi 8y ago
Is there anything for startups?
- wyem 8y ago
  The community at indiehackers.com is quite helpful.

krapp 8y ago

You realize a lot of people consider moderating harassment, hate speech and threats to simply be a pretext for excessive moderation though, right? Almost every thread about $site's moderation policy devolves into arguments about whether "actual hate speech" even exists (there are people who consider what other people consider hate speech to be "messy truth" after all), or whether any form of moderation can exist on a site that claims to support free speech. The standard you're setting isn't an unrealized ideal - it's how many online communities already work, and those communities are still rejected because the boundaries they set are inevitably boundaries others consider intolerable. There are few, if any, sites on the open web which allow "absolute free speech" because that, by definition, would allow hate speech, threats, open discussion of pedophilia and and other illegal activity. And honestly, almost no one wants that except the assholes, pedos and criminals. Even setting the bar to "anything, so long as it isn't illegal" is tricky, because legality varies from place to place, and the site owner is bound to follow the laws of wherever the server is (AFAIK.) > example ive seen comments deleted here on hn related to drug culture, presumably because a drug is illegal in the usa I've seen plenty of pro-drug content here, and people discussing their use openly. I doubt there is widespread censorship on that basis, more likely someone was being uncivil. Although arguably requiring civility is, itself, a kind of censorship. Also, threads here are never actually deleted, just marked as dead. You can still see them with showdead turned on.

modzu 8y ago
i could just as easily say, "almost no one wants a hacker discussion forum". "hackers" are a small subset of society. it's fine for hn to exist and cater to this group, right? yet here, humor, satire, and a variety of "OK" things to discuss and share are considered off-topic and not permitted. just like when hn started and people thought it would just turn into reddit, i do think its possible for a forum where free speech is celebrated to not turn into a nazi club. i'm glad we have law abiding individuals in society. but make no mistake, laws and morals are not equal, and indeed if we cannot have a space to discuss things that are illegal but possibly moral, we're talking dystopia
- DoreenMichele 8y ago
  it's fine for hn to exist and cater to this group, right? yet here, humor, satire, and a variety of "OK" things to discuss and share are considered off-topic and not permitted I think it depends a lot on how you discuss things.
  - modzu 8y ago
    agreed; i think its also probably exacerbated in certain cases due to the small (single?) qty of moderators on hn (ie strong potential bias); similar issues happen on wikipedia, where subject matter experts occassionally butt heads with editors
    - DoreenMichele 8y ago
      Humor is also not forbidden here. It's just hard to pull off, but I've had the occasional humorous remark upvoted by a good bit. (I've also gotten plenty of humorous remarks downvoted. It's hard to play to this crowd in that way.) I'm a demographic outlier. I often stick out like a sore thumb. I've had to work at figuring HN out. It didn't come naturally. I try to not take things too personally and to remember it's a forum with a whole lot of traffic, so you are occasionally going to get downvotes or not great replies just due to "laws of large numbers" kind of thing.
      - newsbinator 8y ago
        Humor is tough partly because it's a tough crowd, I guess, and partly because there aren't as many native English speakers as there are on, say, Reddit.
        DoreenMichele 8y ago
        An awful lot of humor is either really ugly stuff or vacuous. Either of those violates the guidelines here. Trying to be funny without being either ugly or vacuous sets the bar pretty high on what you can successfully joke about.
      - matt_the_bass 8y ago
        On a related note, i find most of the humor that does not get down voted really funny. I enjoy that. But I also u joy that every child comment is not trying to be a joke like on reddit.
- krapp 8y ago
  >if we cannot have a space to discuss things that are illegal but possibly moral, we're talking dystopia There are plenty of spaces to discuss such things, but not every space is obliged to play by those rules. And if you can't find one, nothing is stopping you from making one. At the end of the day, every site is a petty dictatorship. That's true for HN, Reddit, Voat, 4chan, 8chan, the deep web, the dark web, wherever - whomever owns the site makes the rules and has arbitrary control over the content (unless the law says otherwise, or regardless of the law in some cases.) But not even the big social media silos control the entire thing. Google might derank my site, but they can't take it off the web (assuming they don't host it, somehow.) My hosting provider might take my site off the web, but I can find another. I don't think we're anywhere near dystopia yet.
  - anewguy9000 8y ago
    of course sites have their own policies. not sure i agree that "there are plenty of spaces to discuss such things". don't see many examples in this thread; only "gab" is mentioned as being tolerant of controversial/illegal subjects, and man, is it getting blasted for it. wikipedia describes it as a "haven for neo-nazis". yikes! isn't there room for something simpler? for example here on HN, was a discussion about staying motivated to work on challenging stuff. a comment about cocaine was deleted. well, the truth is, plenty of lawyers straight-up depend on that stuff, the way programmers depend on JAVA. why is this comment deleted? because it's bad? illegal? might tempt some kids to try it and ruin their life? whatever the reason for the censorship, the truth is being hidden aka “showdead". so there are a couple of inter-related things going on here that i'd love to see addressed by a community, if not this community: 1. transparency. lobsters does this well. if there is going to be moderation and censorship, be transparent about it, and about why its happening. every change a mod makes on lobsters includes a "commit message" explaining the action. conversely users on hn get banned and may not even know.. 2. free speech is about more than providing a space for neo-nazis and trolls and otherwise people who belong in jail or segregated from society. i think the analog is the academic vs the corporate world. we have scientists using up public money to think about stuff that may never have any actual value to society. but we enshrine their ability to do that work because its necessary in order to make discoveries. similarly, actual thought, genuine knowledge, which should be the end-goal of any discussion that is not merely rhetoric, ought to be concerned with arriving at some kind of truth or truthful conclusion. we can't do that if we are too broad with our censorship, as evidenced with the cocaine comment. pretending cocaine doesn't exist doesn't make you right when everything you've read says that tea is the most powerful stimulant. 3. to krapps point about petty dictators -- yes, indeed, and that's important so that communities can have identities and topics and focus and not just decay into noise. but it seems that providers -- you mention google, hosting companies, ISPs, etc -- all play it safe, and are absolutely not interested in participating in the free speech debate at all. thus they are very much gatekeepers. no, you cannot get popular online while being blacklisted on google, or kicked around from one host to another (at least it must be an order of magnitude more difficult, esp for niche communities). even self-hosting is not really a viable option. academic institutions are an option here, but i do worry about it changing in the future.
modzu 8y ago
thank you for the showdead tip

lIl1l 8y ago

Howdy! I run the site. We see ourselves as complimentary to HN. HN is a wonderful community and I've made some dear friends for life here. That said, some diffs: 1. The codebase is MIT licensed (per pg) and freely available: https://bit.ly/2E318hq https://bit.ly/2E318hq 2. Submissions go straight to the front page. This won't last, but everyone has shown restraint and good taste so far. If something catches your interest and teaches us about the world, it's probably a good fit for the site; go ahead and submit it. 3. You can tag stories as whatever you want. Some of my favorites are: essays|classics: https://bit.ly/2BrIoqo https://bit.ly/2BrIoqo !dev&!programming&!news: https://bit.ly/2GgGw7O https://bit.ly/2GgGw7O videos: https://bit.ly/2UPPagM https://bit.ly/2UPPagM 4. We have an active feature requests thread, and it's not uncommon for features to be implemented within a few hours after being requested: https://bit.ly/2THTgrb https://bit.ly/2THTgrb 5. Easter eggs! - We just launched /l/place, a clone of reddit's old r/place. It's written in Arc: https://bit.ly/2UNwwpP https://bit.ly/2UNwwpP (Every pixel is a form with a submit button. Arc is awesome.) - Chess easter egg: https://bit.ly/2thqlPc https://bit.ly/2thqlPc - HTTP status code 418: I'm a teapot https://bit.ly/2GjRYQ2 https://bit.ly/2GjRYQ2 - Terry Davis used to post to HN with "God says... {a bunch of random words}." One of his last comments revealed the script he used to generate those: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15609972 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15609972 #!/bin/bash #This prints random words from the Linux dictionary. echo "$(shuf -n 32 /usr/share/dict/words --random-source=/dev/urandom | tr '\n' ' ')" So I set it up at the bottom of /l/templeos: https://bit.ly/2TCDP3z https://bit.ly/2TCDP3z I listen to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oY33uoBSw3w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oY33uoBSw3w a lot. I wish I'd started the site sooner, so that Terry would've had a place to chat with people. Even youtube nuked his account. 6. We're developing an iOS app that you can pre-alpha test: https://bit.ly/2tev6cf https://bit.ly/2tev6cf Some WIP screenshots: https://bit.ly/2SMFpmt https://bit.ly/2SMFpmt The app is pretty great for reading HN as well, so we're hoping to maybe offer both a site reader and an HN reader. We have an Android plan too. 7. Much of the community hangs out in our Discord server: https://bit.ly/2URZcOx https://bit.ly/2URZcOx (There are some top-shelf programming memes in the #silliness channel. Feel free to append to it.) 8. Private submissions. If you submit to /l/private, no one can see the submission except you. I've been using the site as a personal bookmarking service, and I find myself using it more often than Pinboard nowadays. https://bit.ly/2WURqW0 https://bit.ly/2WURqW0 (There's still the question of how to import 4,000 bookmarks from pinboard. not sure yet. https://bit.ly/2BulZsu https://bit.ly/2BulZsu) -- Some similarities: 1. You can search comments and stories: https://bit.ly/2GypaCN https://bit.ly/2GypaCN 2. The community's growth curve aims to match HN's early growth curve. The tail is about equal now: https://bit.ly/2RTrJBx https://bit.ly/2RTrJBx (pg on twitter: "The graph is the right shape".) 3. A vibrant community with quality conversation. You might like burntsushi's comment about his two-way string matching studies: https://bit.ly/2TE6VPT https://bit.ly/2TE6VPT 4. You can show your projects and ask the community whatever you want. (The only threshold for a Show submission is that you have to have put significant work into whatever you're showing. That said, you don't need to have something for people to play with. It can be an idea you've been working on, an unfinished side project, or a full product launch.) https://bit.ly/2WXjGHk https://bit.ly/2WXjGHk https://bit.ly/2BuHEkm https://bit.ly/2BuHEkm

modzu 8y ago
thanks for the detailed comparison (and laughs in #sillyness)! like it so far :)