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Ask HN: Are there any good discussion forums left?

14 points by Alekhine 5y ago

When most people think of a forum, they probably think of Reddit. But Reddit is a news aggregation site, not a discussion forum. It is constantly pushing new content, old content is not meant to be consumed, and it is also not meant for meaningful discussion. This is reflected in the awful search feature, upvotes, etc. A kind of site that was probably well known to most in the early 2000s and later was the forum. Threads could go on for years, and responses could be incredibly in depth. Are there any active sites like that today?

ThePhysicist 5y ago
There are still some community forums that have withstood commercialization and that are run by passionate enthusiasts. I'm mostly active in German forums and I can think of sites like mikrocontroller.net (micro-electronics related discussions), kaffee-netz.de (coffee, espresso related discussions) and aquariumforum.de (aquarium-related discussions). I'd imagine there are tons of such forums in other areas and in the US as well.
- Alekhine 5y ago
  As usual, it's the niche communities that survive. I do wish I could find something more general, though. I guess HN is as good as it gets for that.
marto1 5y ago
You're staring at one right now :-)
- whatev84583 5y ago
  Are you sure? Are you aware that people are shadowbanned on a daily basis for having wrong viewpoints? HN is only a good discussion forum as long as you do nothing more than fidget with the frills of narratives that have been decided elsewhere to be correct. If you fundamentally disagree with some important narrative, even if you're polite and provide evidence, you'll get voted down. Get voted down enough, and HN will rate-limit you, and even trying to continue to participate will be taken as hostile activity, and you'll be shadowbanned. Submit an article that's timely, informative, well-sourced, etc., but goes against the narrative? It'll be flagged without justification. Submit it again? It'll be marked as a dupe, and you're at risk of being shadowbanned. Talking about any of this is against the rules. They think it's "boring" to hear numerous indisputably true examples of their misbehavior. Do it, and you'll be flagged, or shadowbanned.
  - k4ch0w 5y ago
    I don't know, this place feels like the last haven of real conversations going on besides blind. I think people here do a good job with disagreements and provide good evidence to convince others. I don't want to discount you, but I'm skeptical. You are new and I'm guessing you got banned. Could you provide an examples of where this happened and one of the important narratives? Can you define wrong viewpoints and give an example?
    - whatev84583 5y ago
      > I don't want to discount you, but I'm skeptical. You are new and I'm guessing you got banned. That's fair, but I'm not actually new. If you really joined in 2017, then you're many years newer than I am. Yes, I've been shadowbanned many times. I've lost count. Maybe thirty times? Most of the time it's hard to link to the evidence in such a way that you could see it for yourself. I'd like to link you to submissions of mine that got upvotes and had conversations going on, but were then anonymously flagged without justification, but it's not possible to link to them. It's not possible to see from the outside that an account has been shadowbanned without comparing the behavior of logged-in and non-logged-in accounts. Example of a wrong, unacceptable viewpoint: humanity is not actually on the brink of climate catastrophe due to CO2 emissions. Recently there was a fearmongering article from Nature about climate doom, and I linked to sea level graphs generated by NOAA that showed linear, rather than accelerating change in sea level, and was apparently shadowbanned for that. Obviously, linking to NOAA in support of a climate doom comment would not be a bannable offense. Edit: oh, and I've apparently already been placed in some kind of slow-play mode. I responded about an hour ago, but you can't see it. Are most people aware stuff like this goes on on HN?
    - mandmandam 5y ago
      I've a good example for you: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16576569 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16576569 , and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16578715 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16578715 Both these posts reached front page, with lively and active discussions. Both were quickly flagged. I would have some difficulty thinking of a more important topic. This post on it was also flagged, then unflagged once it would never reach front page: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16579219 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16579219 Dang's comment was that the links "didn't fit site guidelines". This is despite the fact that people clearly found the story important, interesting, and were having constructive discussion about it. Posts about this censorship quickly rose, attracted discussion, and were then flagged and deleted. Posters were banned. What other stories are treated like this? How would we even know? If this post somehow reached front page, I'd expect it to be flagged too; as off-topic, or too meta, or against site guidelines. People would pop up like clockwork to defend the decision, praise the site's moderation, etc.
soheil 5y ago
https://bitcointalk.org/ https://bitcointalk.org/ A lot of car forums survived redditification, probably because those communities are run by car enthusiasts who passionately care about every detail and would never surrender control to a benevolent central authority just so that they don't have to do slightly more work maintaining the site than they otherwise would have. Search for almost any popular sports car and you're sure to find extremely popular forums that date back to either the early days of the internet or when the manufacturer started production.
- tunap 5y ago
  Of course, you may have to follow the breadcrumbs to find the current active forum after the mass-exodus(es) from the previous 'go-to' forum after the admin(s) did something to initiate a subset of the users to fork.
admissionsguy 5y ago
A few, e.g. PhysicsForums.com, but they are all waning and it's quite sad.
codingclaws 5y ago
https://www.peachesnstink.com https://www.peachesnstink.com - I am the creator. - It is a link aggregation site like Reddit and HN, but the link field is optional. - Threads are never closed. - No front-end JavaScript. - No voting. - There are actually no admins or moderators. Instead we show nothing by default and users must whitelist other users. - Open source: https://github.com/ferg1e/peaches-n-stink https://github.com/ferg1e/peaches-n-stink - This probably sounds like a crazy site but it appears to be working and I've had some nice convos with some of the users.
fotad 5y ago
https://nabble.com/ https://nabble.com/ Lots of open source project use it as web ui for mailing list
drstewart 5y ago
Something Awful is still active, though your mileage may vary as far as "good" goes.
BJBBB 5y ago
HN is one of my most beloved sites. It also infuriates me; and this is not a bad thing. I do not mind the down-vote if the reason is apolitical and explained. [aside note: Gackle and Bell are interesting - they are worth 15 or 20 min looking at DDG links.] And 'Dang' responses seem to be sincere at their attempts to keep HN a viable and reasonable site for techies. While I think that a few of their responses border on hilariously ridiculous, they seem to be earnest. My answer to your question is, other than HN, probably nothing else is reasonable. While HN is mostly by and for coding peoples, it oft provides interesting discussions of engineering, science, and society. My remaining favorite discussion forums are densely technical and increasingly narrow in scope, so would not meet your requirements.
Gustomaximus 5y ago
In Australia we have Whirlpool: https://forums.whirlpool.net.au/ https://forums.whirlpool.net.au/ I do wonder if there is value in having basic interfaces. This combined with tech focus seem to have created 2 of the better discussions/information sites IMO (whirlpool and HN). While a bit more domain specific, webmaster world used to be good, still might be but I haven't been visiting for a couple of years: https://www.webmasterworld.com/ https://www.webmasterworld.com/