9 ms·

Ask HN: HN-like forum for literature and cinema?

54 points by georgex7 4y ago

Is there any forum like HN where people discuss film, literature, etc?

ihateolives 4y ago
Once upon a time MetaFilter used to be a place to have interesting discussions, but I haven't been there for a decade or so it feels like and can't vouch for the current state. https://www.metafilter.com https://www.metafilter.com
- karaterobot 4y ago
  Hey, me too. Was a frequent poster around the turn of the century, left around 2007, but was considering going back. It seems like Jessamyn West now runs it, which is nice. In its day, it was the smartest and most interesting discussion forum I've been a member of: I still measure everything else against it.
- kbyatnal 4y ago
  Not sure about the main site, but AskMetaFilter still has a high level of discussion content. I find myself checking it every so often.
- tdoggette 4y ago
  There is a specific subsite there for media discussions: https://fanfare.metafilter.com/ https://fanfare.metafilter.com/
from 4y ago
The forum section of “elite” private trackers.
- actionfromafar 4y ago
  Isn't that where you talk about codecs and such?
  - from 4y ago
    No they have recommendations and discussions and stuff like that. IRC channels too.
- ghostpepper 4y ago
  OP didn't mention music but some of the private music trackers are/were the best place online to discuss music with other enthusiasts even if you never downloaded a single track
- grenoire 4y ago
  What are some music/movie trackers a normal dude has a good shot at getting into? Open to studying obscure archival standards and peering.
  - from 4y ago
    Redacted.ch is the best music tracker and has an interview process that’s open to anyone (https://interviewfor.red/en/index.html https://interviewfor.red/en/index.html). The interview process is basically entirely copied from what.cd. Spectral analysis is the only part that actually requires any thought but you’re allowed to get a question or two wrong on the interview and I think you can retake it a couple times if you fail. For movies/tv the best ones require working your way up on Redacted by uploading stuff and having a high “buffer” (total uploaded - total downloaded). To find stuff to upload you can either buy CDs or just transcode existing FLAC releases into MP3s if they have not already been converted. You can circumvent grinding your way to higher level trackers by making friends on IRC who will invite you. Or just buy an account and hope you aren’t caught (not advised).
    - sneak 4y ago
      Which IRC networks and channels?
      - from 4y ago
        I was referring the to member only channels that most private trackers have (the general process to move up in tracker world has been join redacted/what.cd, make power user rank, use that to join some mid level trackers, and either meet a friend in high places from your existing trackers or grind your way to higher ranks by uploading a bunch of stuff). There probably are lots of private tracker members on general public IRCs like Rizon though.
- yewenjie 4y ago
  If you're really into arthouse/ niche world cinema, getting an invite to Karagarga would be worth it. I have seen very few communities with such passion and quality.
  - dole 4y ago
    Invites are legendary for being near unobtainium. https://nationalpost.com/entertainment/weekend-post/karagarga-and-the-vulnerability-of-obscure-films https://nationalpost.com/entertainment/weekend-post/karagarg...
habibur 4y ago
reddit?
krnsll 4y ago
If you're willing to pay, Interintellect might be it. https://interintellect.com/ https://interintellect.com/
coldpie 4y ago
The Something Awful forums have subforums for those topics.
mg 4y ago
It feels like a lifetime ago, but one of my first online projects included discussion boards for literature and movies. You can still browse them: Literature: https://www.gnooks.com/discussion/ https://www.gnooks.com/discussion/ Movies: https://www.gnovies.com/discussion/ https://www.gnovies.com/discussion/ There must be around 100k forums in there. It was a pretty crowded place back then with a lot of cool people. Moderation was a full time job though. And very stressful. As ads became less and less of a way to make an income online, at some point it was just too much work to justify continuing it. So I closed them. I still fantasize about reopening them one day. Maybe with paid memberships. That would allow to keep the work under control (because fewer people sign up) and to pay someone to do the moderation. PS: Man, I haven't looked at the discussion boards for years. Now that I do, I notice how archaic it is to not have suggestions in the search bar. You have to type the exact author name to get to the right board. One moment, let me implement typeaheads ... I'll be right back ... done!
- overthemoon 4y ago
  Cool projects. I've always wanted to run something like that. What made moderation stressful?
  - mg 4y ago
    It is hard to keep the discussion friendly and on-topic. And mod actions very often result in someone becoming angry. Which is not only stressful but now you have to deal with off-topic meta discussions about the mod actions.
- holler 4y ago
  Whoa! You're the author of Gnod? I've used your site gnovies.com and gnoosic countless times and recommended it to friends! Really great tool and I discovered both movies and music I otherwise wouldn't have found. Example I input: Bladerunner, Inception, and Ex Machina into gnovies and discovered a movie called Upgrade that I thoroughly enjoyed, and otherwise wouldn't have known about. (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6499752/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6499752/) Appreciate your work, thanks! PS What do you work on in more recent times?
greenie_beans 4y ago
used to be https://htmlgiant.com/ https://htmlgiant.com/
- ultrasandwich 4y ago
  Yeah this was absolutely amazing. Blake did a great job curating the contributors and the comments led to some great conversations sometimes.
comfypotato 4y ago
“Arts and letter daily” posts this content. Not a forum though. I don’t know how content is selected, but it’s good. I check it every day.
joenot443 4y ago
With the same quality of discussion and excellent moderation? I'm sorry to say that one does not exist for those topics. YMMV, but both /lit/ and Goodreads still have some great discussion amongst all the deep-fried drivel. Most 2000s-era communities have been swallowed by the reddit leviathan and are now made up of similarly low-quality, validation seeking type of discourse.
- shagie 4y ago
  > With the same quality of discussion and excellent moderation? ... Most 2000s-era communities have been swallowed by the reddit leviathan and are now made up of similarly low-quality, validation seeking type of discourse. There's nothing saying that one can't create a community on reddit and moderate it severely. Yes, it will get some flack from being one of the subs where the moderators delete everything. The community and moderation evolve together and with a few exceptions of being able to edit titles after the fact or change where links point to - reddit offers similar moderation tooling. What is needed is the "create a sub, and moderate it to match the vision." Be it reddit or grabbing a reddit clone and hosting it yourself, or finding another format that works better - the problem is similar. And the core problem there is that volunteer moderation is a thankless task that people only complain about and rarely praise.
  - derefr 4y ago
    The core problem of using Reddit as hosting is that Reddit's site-global social gamification mechanisms incentivize things — posting jokes, hearsay, etc — that a "serious" community (e.g. /r/AskHistorians/) explicitly wants to disincentivize. With no ability for a subreddit community to opt out of these gamification mechanisms. So your moderation efforts are always fighting against the direction the system wants to push things. Hosting a community on Reddit, is like having a shortest-path route between two buildings that cuts through a grassy field, and then sticking a sign up saying "keep off the grass" and writing tickets for anyone seen on the grass. Rather than being able to either pave the shortest-route path, or rearrange the buildings so that the route between them doesn't go through the field. There's also no ability to enable any kind of "moderated mode" on a subreddit where only subscribers may post, or where posts/comments (of new users, recent subscribers, etc) must go through a moderation queue. So you're always getting drive-by posts from users who don't know where they are or what the rules are, nor are they going to stick around long enough to care to learn them. The classic "I just found this on /r/all" comment. (You can make a subreddit invite-only, but then people can't even see posts/comments from the subreddit if they're not logged in — i.e. the subreddit is no longer a public website — which is rarely desired.)
poisonarena 4y ago
/tv/ + /lit/ nothing comes close, the insane stuff posted there actually works to keep the space relatively clean from redditors
- jfax 4y ago
  Seconding this, and I'll also add in /co/. Genuinely haven't experienced anywhere else on the internet that has given me as much as these imageboards have. Nothing is too obscure or too mainstream to discuss.
- james-redwood 4y ago
  In my personal experience the quality of discussion is awful on both boards. It’s genuinely worse than Reddit, which was a low bar.
marstall 4y ago
or quality TV (esp. non-American TV)?
olalonde 4y ago
For cinema, the PassThePopcorn torrent tracker has a really nice community with forums and lots of user-driven content (reviews, collections, etc.). I used to browse it to discover new films. Unfortunately, it's really difficult to get an invite and my account got disabled due to inactivity.
tills13 4y ago
reddit.
paleduardo 4y ago
ClassyJacket 4y ago
Unfortunately, your best option is most likely the ridiculously, laughably, absurdly over-moderated reddit. I wish you the best trudging into the hellhole that place has become.
holler 4y ago
Hey, we'd welcome discussion on those topics over on Sqwok. https://sqwok.im/p/ReSGugPjqF4lhw https://sqwok.im/p/ReSGugPjqF4lhw - "Any recent interesting books, you've been reading?" https://sqwok.im https://sqwok.im
Tenoke 4y ago
r/TrueFilm has slightly better discussions than the other movie-related subs. Realistically, the common place nowadays is likely letterboxd (and similar sites) in the form of leaving reviews and comments on them.
kbyatnal 4y ago
Finding new forums and communities like this is one of the reasons I built CrowdView: https://crew-rho.vercel.app/ https://crew-rho.vercel.app/ It's a search engine specifically for forums and discussion content (think message boards, Discords, Twitter, and ofc Reddit). If you try some literature/cinema queries, I think you'll end up with something interesting. I tried "favorite books all time" and found a few literature forums: booktalk.org, forums.onlinebookclub.org, bookcrossing.com/forum, kboards.com, worldliteratureforum.com, proz.com/forum/literature_poetry-22.html, forum.thegradcafe.com/forum/43-literature-and-rhetoric-and-composition/
qersist3nce 4y ago
/tv/ and their "Absolute Kinos" lol!
dgeiser13 4y ago
Cafe Society on The Straight Dope Message Board is good. https://boards.straightdope.com/c/cafe-society/15 https://boards.straightdope.com/c/cafe-society/15
heystefan 4y ago
Don't know if it's still alive, but these used to be filled with really high quality convos: https://www.ilxor.com/ILX/ https://www.ilxor.com/ILX/
n65463f23_4 4y ago
4chan has a literature board

54 points by georgex7 4y ago

Is there any forum like HN where people discuss film, literature, etc?

Once upon a time MetaFilter used to be a place to have interesting discussions, but I haven't been there for a decade or so it feels like and can't vouch for the current state. https://www.metafilter.com https://www.metafilter.com

karaterobot 4y ago
Hey, me too. Was a frequent poster around the turn of the century, left around 2007, but was considering going back. It seems like Jessamyn West now runs it, which is nice. In its day, it was the smartest and most interesting discussion forum I've been a member of: I still measure everything else against it.
kbyatnal 4y ago
Not sure about the main site, but AskMetaFilter still has a high level of discussion content. I find myself checking it every so often.
tdoggette 4y ago
There is a specific subsite there for media discussions: https://fanfare.metafilter.com/ https://fanfare.metafilter.com/

from 4y ago

The forum section of “elite” private trackers.

actionfromafar 4y ago
Isn't that where you talk about codecs and such?
- from 4y ago
  No they have recommendations and discussions and stuff like that. IRC channels too.
ghostpepper 4y ago
OP didn't mention music but some of the private music trackers are/were the best place online to discuss music with other enthusiasts even if you never downloaded a single track
grenoire 4y ago
What are some music/movie trackers a normal dude has a good shot at getting into? Open to studying obscure archival standards and peering.
- from 4y ago
  Redacted.ch is the best music tracker and has an interview process that’s open to anyone (https://interviewfor.red/en/index.html https://interviewfor.red/en/index.html). The interview process is basically entirely copied from what.cd. Spectral analysis is the only part that actually requires any thought but you’re allowed to get a question or two wrong on the interview and I think you can retake it a couple times if you fail. For movies/tv the best ones require working your way up on Redacted by uploading stuff and having a high “buffer” (total uploaded - total downloaded). To find stuff to upload you can either buy CDs or just transcode existing FLAC releases into MP3s if they have not already been converted. You can circumvent grinding your way to higher level trackers by making friends on IRC who will invite you. Or just buy an account and hope you aren’t caught (not advised).
  - sneak 4y ago
    Which IRC networks and channels?
    - from 4y ago
      I was referring the to member only channels that most private trackers have (the general process to move up in tracker world has been join redacted/what.cd, make power user rank, use that to join some mid level trackers, and either meet a friend in high places from your existing trackers or grind your way to higher ranks by uploading a bunch of stuff). There probably are lots of private tracker members on general public IRCs like Rizon though.
yewenjie 4y ago
If you're really into arthouse/ niche world cinema, getting an invite to Karagarga would be worth it. I have seen very few communities with such passion and quality.
- dole 4y ago
  Invites are legendary for being near unobtainium. https://nationalpost.com/entertainment/weekend-post/karagarga-and-the-vulnerability-of-obscure-films https://nationalpost.com/entertainment/weekend-post/karagarg...

habibur 4y ago

reddit?

krnsll 4y ago

If you're willing to pay, Interintellect might be it. https://interintellect.com/ https://interintellect.com/

coldpie 4y ago

The Something Awful forums have subforums for those topics.

mg 4y ago

It feels like a lifetime ago, but one of my first online projects included discussion boards for literature and movies. You can still browse them: Literature: https://www.gnooks.com/discussion/ https://www.gnooks.com/discussion/ Movies: https://www.gnovies.com/discussion/ https://www.gnovies.com/discussion/ There must be around 100k forums in there. It was a pretty crowded place back then with a lot of cool people. Moderation was a full time job though. And very stressful. As ads became less and less of a way to make an income online, at some point it was just too much work to justify continuing it. So I closed them. I still fantasize about reopening them one day. Maybe with paid memberships. That would allow to keep the work under control (because fewer people sign up) and to pay someone to do the moderation. PS: Man, I haven't looked at the discussion boards for years. Now that I do, I notice how archaic it is to not have suggestions in the search bar. You have to type the exact author name to get to the right board. One moment, let me implement typeaheads ... I'll be right back ... done!

overthemoon 4y ago
Cool projects. I've always wanted to run something like that. What made moderation stressful?
- mg 4y ago
  It is hard to keep the discussion friendly and on-topic. And mod actions very often result in someone becoming angry. Which is not only stressful but now you have to deal with off-topic meta discussions about the mod actions.
holler 4y ago
Whoa! You're the author of Gnod? I've used your site gnovies.com and gnoosic countless times and recommended it to friends! Really great tool and I discovered both movies and music I otherwise wouldn't have found. Example I input: Bladerunner, Inception, and Ex Machina into gnovies and discovered a movie called Upgrade that I thoroughly enjoyed, and otherwise wouldn't have known about. (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6499752/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6499752/) Appreciate your work, thanks! PS What do you work on in more recent times?

greenie_beans 4y ago

used to be https://htmlgiant.com/ https://htmlgiant.com/

ultrasandwich 4y ago
Yeah this was absolutely amazing. Blake did a great job curating the contributors and the comments led to some great conversations sometimes.

comfypotato 4y ago

“Arts and letter daily” posts this content. Not a forum though. I don’t know how content is selected, but it’s good. I check it every day.

joenot443 4y ago

With the same quality of discussion and excellent moderation? I'm sorry to say that one does not exist for those topics. YMMV, but both /lit/ and Goodreads still have some great discussion amongst all the deep-fried drivel. Most 2000s-era communities have been swallowed by the reddit leviathan and are now made up of similarly low-quality, validation seeking type of discourse.

shagie 4y ago
> With the same quality of discussion and excellent moderation? ... Most 2000s-era communities have been swallowed by the reddit leviathan and are now made up of similarly low-quality, validation seeking type of discourse. There's nothing saying that one can't create a community on reddit and moderate it severely. Yes, it will get some flack from being one of the subs where the moderators delete everything. The community and moderation evolve together and with a few exceptions of being able to edit titles after the fact or change where links point to - reddit offers similar moderation tooling. What is needed is the "create a sub, and moderate it to match the vision." Be it reddit or grabbing a reddit clone and hosting it yourself, or finding another format that works better - the problem is similar. And the core problem there is that volunteer moderation is a thankless task that people only complain about and rarely praise.
- derefr 4y ago
  The core problem of using Reddit as hosting is that Reddit's site-global social gamification mechanisms incentivize things — posting jokes, hearsay, etc — that a "serious" community (e.g. /r/AskHistorians/) explicitly wants to disincentivize. With no ability for a subreddit community to opt out of these gamification mechanisms. So your moderation efforts are always fighting against the direction the system wants to push things. Hosting a community on Reddit, is like having a shortest-path route between two buildings that cuts through a grassy field, and then sticking a sign up saying "keep off the grass" and writing tickets for anyone seen on the grass. Rather than being able to either pave the shortest-route path, or rearrange the buildings so that the route between them doesn't go through the field. There's also no ability to enable any kind of "moderated mode" on a subreddit where only subscribers may post, or where posts/comments (of new users, recent subscribers, etc) must go through a moderation queue. So you're always getting drive-by posts from users who don't know where they are or what the rules are, nor are they going to stick around long enough to care to learn them. The classic "I just found this on /r/all" comment. (You can make a subreddit invite-only, but then people can't even see posts/comments from the subreddit if they're not logged in — i.e. the subreddit is no longer a public website — which is rarely desired.)

poisonarena 4y ago

/tv/ + /lit/ nothing comes close, the insane stuff posted there actually works to keep the space relatively clean from redditors

jfax 4y ago
Seconding this, and I'll also add in /co/. Genuinely haven't experienced anywhere else on the internet that has given me as much as these imageboards have. Nothing is too obscure or too mainstream to discuss.
james-redwood 4y ago
In my personal experience the quality of discussion is awful on both boards. It’s genuinely worse than Reddit, which was a low bar.

marstall 4y ago

or quality TV (esp. non-American TV)?

olalonde 4y ago

For cinema, the PassThePopcorn torrent tracker has a really nice community with forums and lots of user-driven content (reviews, collections, etc.). I used to browse it to discover new films. Unfortunately, it's really difficult to get an invite and my account got disabled due to inactivity.

tills13 4y ago

reddit.

paleduardo 4y ago

ClassyJacket 4y ago

Unfortunately, your best option is most likely the ridiculously, laughably, absurdly over-moderated reddit. I wish you the best trudging into the hellhole that place has become.

holler 4y ago

Hey, we'd welcome discussion on those topics over on Sqwok. https://sqwok.im/p/ReSGugPjqF4lhw https://sqwok.im/p/ReSGugPjqF4lhw - "Any recent interesting books, you've been reading?" https://sqwok.im https://sqwok.im

Tenoke 4y ago

r/TrueFilm has slightly better discussions than the other movie-related subs. Realistically, the common place nowadays is likely letterboxd (and similar sites) in the form of leaving reviews and comments on them.

kbyatnal 4y ago

Finding new forums and communities like this is one of the reasons I built CrowdView: https://crew-rho.vercel.app/ https://crew-rho.vercel.app/ It's a search engine specifically for forums and discussion content (think message boards, Discords, Twitter, and ofc Reddit). If you try some literature/cinema queries, I think you'll end up with something interesting. I tried "favorite books all time" and found a few literature forums: booktalk.org, forums.onlinebookclub.org, bookcrossing.com/forum, kboards.com, worldliteratureforum.com, proz.com/forum/literature_poetry-22.html, forum.thegradcafe.com/forum/43-literature-and-rhetoric-and-composition/

qersist3nce 4y ago

/tv/ and their "Absolute Kinos" lol!

dgeiser13 4y ago

Cafe Society on The Straight Dope Message Board is good. https://boards.straightdope.com/c/cafe-society/15 https://boards.straightdope.com/c/cafe-society/15

heystefan 4y ago

Don't know if it's still alive, but these used to be filled with really high quality convos: https://www.ilxor.com/ILX/ https://www.ilxor.com/ILX/

n65463f23_4 4y ago

4chan has a literature board