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Ask HN: Is there anywhere as intellectually curious as kuro5hin used to be?
It seems like kuro5hin from 2000 to 2006 or so was just about the best WWW forum of all time. Trolling and bad jokes, sure, but the discussion quality was higher than just about anywhere discussing technical topics on the WWW today. Where's the equivalent today?
- duxup 7y agoOh man I used to post on there, but I'm not sure I'd call it unusually intellectually curious.... but hey why not.
- kick 7y agoWhen did you stop? It seems like 2007 was the point of no return for most of the users posting the really meaty content.
- Mister_X 7y agoIt's a different time, the net world changed forever after AOL got the "masses" on-line. slashdot, kuro5hin, usenet, a few other choice places, all either gone, or polluted by willfully ignorant voices. Or outright mean spirited, aggressive trolls, like Rusty of kuro5hin found out the hard way, poor guy. You may find Metafilter of interest. I'd be interested in other places as well, I never found a replacement for those lost treasures of the early net. I still have my tattered original kuro5hin T-shirt, can't wear it, but can't bear to throw it out.
- btilly 7y agoAOL got the "masses" on-line in 1993. That caused https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September. All of the sites that you named except Usenet postdated that event.
- generalpass 7y agoAOL began to get really big when they launched unlimited minutes, I think '96 or '97. The unwashed masses adopted a few years later. AOL of '02 was nothing like AOL of '97.
- geoelectric 7y agoI wouldn't put too much gloss on that. I was on AOL from its original GeoWorks-based release forward, and it always had considerably more mass appeal than icb/forumnet, IRC, Usenet, or any of the other Internet-based forums/chatrooms of the time. It was night-and-day. You have to remember before there was AOL there was Prodigy, Quantum Link/PC-Link (which became AOL), CompuServe, GEnie, etc--all services that were mass-marketed to some extent and had healthy user bases that were mostly not very technical or academic. Modems were easy to use and ubiquitous at that point so if you had a computer at home, there was a decent chance you had one. A lot of the early AOL folks consolidated from those services and the social BBS scenes, which were also not nearly as techie as you'd imagine. So yeah, there were a lot less of us than when they started shipping out discs with hundreds of hours and later unlimited, but the audience wasn't necessarily more sophisticated. As soon as it was a standalone app and not GeoWorks-based, in particular, it seriously took off.
- Mister_X 7y agoSorry, wasn't trying to rewrite history, just making the point that those places were changed by an infusion of willfully ignorant people who drastically lowered the signal to noise ratio. I started on usenet in '85, and saw the decline there, but for slashdot and kuro5hin I seem to recall a different "trigger" of some sort that brought the masses there, it happened rapidly and was not a welcome change
- cable2600 7y agoThere isn't any that I knew of. http://kr5ddit.com/ http://kr5ddit.com/ tried to do it but went down as Alpha Racks went dark. Now it is a chat forum.
- drannex 7y agoNot sure how Kuro5hin was, but tildes.net may be something of interest. I have 10 invites available right now, and I am not affiliated with them — just enjoy the discussions and community that are growing.
- leoh 7y agoWould love an invite if you are offering! Email in my profile.
- rexer 7y agoIf that was an invitation to ask for an invite, consider this a request! My keybase is in my profile. Reddit continues to devolve, and I'm always looking for new online communities to replace it.
- _virtu 7y agoI would also be interested.
- Deimorz 7y ago(Tildes is my site) The best explanation of the site's goals and values is still the original announcement blog post: https://blog.tildes.net/announcing-tildes https://blog.tildes.net/announcing-tildes Here's the discussion on HN at the time too (note that the site was totally private at that time and you couldn't even view it without an invite yet): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17103093 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17103093 I assume drannex will run out of invites soon (thanks for offering them!), so if anyone's interested in an invite please feel free to email the address in the blog post and I'll send you one tomorrow. It's not intended to be difficult to get an invite, I just want to keep the growth controlled while a base site culture and more features continue getting built up.
- divbzero 7y agoThank you for your offer! I too would be interested if there are still invites available.
- stroballs 7y agoI would like an invitation, please
- muzani 7y agoI guess the requirement is that it can't take itself too seriously. People can discuss what they like. Nobody is trying to hunt down people with an unpopular, sincere opinion. I've seen a friend share something from a space colonization site - what an absurd idea, but also fun and interesting. Too bad I didn't keep the link. Some of the old forums are still good. Something Awful is still up there, still a little funny, still a little interesting, but feels a little stale. Bay12 (Dwarf Fortress) forums are good, but have become really tight knit that it's might feel a little clique-ish. Still a good place to discuss those kinds of games. I'd bet the Paradox games forums are good too. There's some erotic RP forums which I won't link, but those usually are good places because they attract a lot of Asperger's people who are educated, good at writing, mature enough to discussing anything at all, and it's very tightly moderated.
- downerending 7y ago> Nobody is trying to hunt down people with an unpopular, sincere opinion. It was a different time. One could posit crazy ideas, play Devil's Advocate for all sorts of horrible positions, and even be an outright asshole, with little consequence other than maybe being dropped into a lot of kill files. Compare that to what happened to Tim Hunt or RMS more recently. Hard to see how we might get back to the older ways. Maybe people will start opening up illicit "speakeasys" where people can, well, speak easily, without fear of life-altering consequences.
- forkexec 7y agoI think one issue with any high-signal commenting platform is there's has to be some sort of standard minimum threshold and investment of emotional/intellectual effort/funds/time to apply. This reduces the tendency for destructive behaviors and low-signal convos.
- fullStackOasis 7y agoFor anyone with historical interest, here's that last HN post by kuro5hin's owner: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11609308 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11609308 > Hey so this is Rusty -- What happened was basically that Internap shut down the data center we were in and had to move the servers, and I conspicuously failed to Deal With Things around that. The content is probably not gone foreve
- tmaly 7y agoI could remember reading kuro5hin. Before that we had usenet. I think back then when it was only tech savy people, everyone followed an implicit code of conduct. Private chat groups are the only place I see now that are like that.
- barefootcoder 7y agoThe word netiquette was used a lot in the very early 90s. I suspect few of today’s users have even heard the word. It’s an unfortunate digression.