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Where do you discuss computer related stuff now?
- jagoan1d5g 3y ago[flagged]
- Prcedural 3y agoVarious discords
- deelowe 3y agoAny suggestions?
- eloisius 3y agoSame. At first I was skeptical but whereas HN, Lobsters, etc are mostly baseless opining (mine included) and hot takes, there are discords where they have more signal than the infotainment I enjoy on HN. I’m in a few where people regularly group-read research papers, help each other understand them, etc. I enjoy HN very much, and I still feel uneasy about the ephemeral format of chat, walled gardens and all that, but the content is refreshing.
- atlintots 3y agoAny discords you're willing to share?
- eloisius 3y agoKarpathy's Zero to Hero Discord is super friendly. Yannic Kilcher's is also cool and seems more active. I like the paper discussions, but it also has more meme-tier antics. This computer vision one is decent: https://discord.gg/MqbXfSG2Wm https://discord.gg/MqbXfSG2Wm
- chrisvalleybay 3y agoI tried joining the Zero to Hero Discord as I love Karpathy's style and vibe, but I couldn't find a way to get in (found expired invites only). Do you by any chance know how to get in?
- eloisius 3y agoHere you go https://discord.gg/ftNamTsq https://discord.gg/ftNamTsq
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- chrisvalleybay 3y agoThank you! I was still unable to join with that link, so maybe they closed it off or something.
- adamredwoods 3y agoIn my opinion, discord is more "active" social media than "passive". My family uses it to communicate with recent updates, but I don't find it of tremendous value for archival information.
- anonzzzies 3y agoIt needs a relatively small community with a strong moderator who will warn people once. Not much of they around as it’s a painful job. I would like just an old fashioned, strict (no endless bickering over politics and wars, just hard tech and show offs what you have been hacking this weekend) forum with most people from r/programminglanguages and some of Hn. That’s enough to keep me entertained anyway. I very much dislike the discord move; no archive.org / publicly available history. So much interesting and valuable stuff is discussed and a year later they close the channel/topic/even server and gone it is. Worthless.
- elliotec 3y agoWhat part of this is different from HN as it is?
- anonzzzies 3y agoHN is good, but a little too much politics topics for my taste, but yes, not for nothing I am here. I was talking about my ideal (utopia) forum which will never happen. Now I am still on reddit for 3 subs and HN and lobsters.
- nnurmanov 3y agoAre you ok to share those 3 subs on reddit?
- anonzzzies 3y agoSure - r/programminglanguages - r/lisp - r/functionalprogramming
- pwpw 3y agoThe issue with lobsters is the difficulty of joining it, which I suppose is a feature.
- midoridensha 3y agoWell, for one thing, HN discussions don't just disappear after a while.
- sundvor 3y agoFor myself: Discord groups in my Sim (racing+flight) communities.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- 0cf8612b2e1e 3y ago[flagged]
- NoPicklez 3y agoFor me the mainspace for discussing computer related stuff is still Reddit. /r/pcmasterrace still has 8 million members and /r/buildapc has 6 million. The viewer counts for these subreddits have only increased even in recent months. HN still has excellent discussions whether its Ask HN or links Was there a problem that begged asking the question in the first place?
- code_duck 3y agoYes, the rationale is briefly described in the exposition to the question. Following recent events such as sudden API price hikes resulting in discontinuation of most 3rd party reddit clients and clumsy communication from the admins, discontent with reddit has been higher than usual recently. It has resulted in reddit alternatives such as Lemmy growing exponentially in the past 1-2 months.
- whoknowsidont 3y ago>Was there a problem that begged asking the question in the first place? I thought the post stated it as concisely as possible. 3rd party clients are being shutdown on reddit, Twitter is, well... doing something. HN isn't an "ask forum", or really a forum at all. I have my personal opinions about the subreddits you mentioned but I won't presume to imply anything that the OP wasn't meaning to say. Sometimes people get lost on the internet when things shift and that appears to be what happened here. OP is just searching for some new outlets. It's a question that will certainly come up again as long as the internet continues to change. You might even find yourself asking it one day.
- thefz 3y agoEven the most obscure technical subreddits (such as bikewrench) are now reduced to users posting a photo and asking "how to fix" or "what is this". Reddit is a dumpster fire and barreling fast to its death. Quality of discussion is abysmal.
- sourcegrift 3y agoCan we get a lobste.rs invitation chain going please? The discussion on there is usually non-fluff and increasingly higher quality and i'd like to chime in once in a while.
- fireattack 3y agoSame here. If anyone can kindly share an invitation, my email address is in my profile. Edit: got one (two actually), thanks forks!
- max_ 3y agoSend me an email.
- tptacek 3y agoMastodon has been pretty great for this stuff for me. Get Ivory and it's basically identical to Twitter.
- _hypx 3y agoMastodon plus the rest of the Fediverse is a good idea. See a big list of servers here: https://fedidb.org/network https://fedidb.org/network
- adamredwoods 3y agoIt's a good idea, but it's not clear how to navigate it. Centralized social media is easier to participate and browse.
- _hypx 3y agoCentralized social media is the reason why we're in the mess we're in right now. Eventually, someone will come up with an effective way to navigate decentralized social media. It will likely mirror what Google did for Web 1.0.
- intended 3y agoAll federated systems will be centralized. Once you get a way to navigate federated things, the navigation becomes the core of the experience. The crux of the internet experience is that Quantity is a quality in itself. Once the navigation window becomes core, and handles the highest volumes, it’s easier to streamline monetary rewards to a single place. Federated communities that work better with whatever navigator/window/Tool is created do well, and will have more resources to expand and gain users.
- _hypx 3y agoYou can replace the centralized navigation system in a federated system if it becomes necessary. But that is not possible in a centralized social media system. Everything is permanently centralized in that system.
- crooked-v 3y agoSomethingAwful is remarkably good, at least as long you stay out of the designated shitpost zones. The combination of monetary buy-in and legacy community does a lot.
- wanda 3y agoI'll second that. Though I have rarely logged into it the last ten years, I used to be more active on SA before that. Lots of people have complained about moderation there but I think it's just a case of avoid the designated spam areas, and don't post nothing. The latter part is how the HN community tends to self-curate comments anyway.
- coding123 3y agoIs Serious Hardware Software Crap still there?
- sph 3y agoI'm not so sure. See, you could say I'm politically on the left, but I've noticed Something Awful is way too radical for my experience of HN and Reddit-style leftism. There is this paradoxical American anti-intellectual air about the site which I didn't notice until using it for a couple years, that turns me off from talking about anything serious. I know it's a comedy site, but often people and mods get angry because you don't agree to the same "eat the rich" mob mentality. US politics has ruined the Internet, and I would like that as far away from my software talk. If a place is politicised, I'd rather have good old anarchism which works well with anti-censorship/cryptography discussion and hacker mentality, than anything on both sides of the political spectrum which turn people into mindless followers.
- thrdbndndn 3y agoI have the same problem too. To me, Hacker News has the best demographics for such discussions (more mature, less recurring jokes, and more importantly most of people here are in good faith), BUT discussion type threads are very unpopular here compared to news-based thread: you can barely get any replies.
- playingalong 3y agoMaybe it's a sign the folks with HN demographics are not into discussions?
- nnurmanov 3y agoThese are the same people (I believe) who discusses post on Reddit or Twitter. I'd rather think that it is because UX, algorithms or other thing which is not related to whether locals are into or not into discussions.
- krapp 3y agoHN is designed to encourage news over discussions. PG thought free discussion would encourage "blogging" and low quality content. Which is why the text of those posts is pre-faded, so the longer they are, the more painful they are to read, and the less likely they are to be engaged with. News posts also get more visibility than text posts.
- lynx23 3y agoI was never really attracted to web forums, be it StackOverflow or Reddit. I still to this day prefer tech discussions on mailing lists. That is the preferable way of cunsuming that sort of content, for me. I prefer reading/writing in a mail client, and I absolutely hate web browsers made into text editors. I miss the times when you could just subscribe to a list of a particular topic, and have interesting content arrive in your INBOX/folder automatically. No need to regularily go somewhere any check if there is intersting content, and no need to fiddle with RSS either. Just a plain old email account, was enough to get really interesting content delivered.
- zer8k 3y agoI don't really and haven't since the death of forums. At a few jobs I found a group of people who were interested in more than just CRUD but inevitably these people leave for greener pastures. It would be cool to have a place like usenet to discuss these things. I don't want to install a thousand shitware apps, or use 10 different sites, just to talk to people. Was much easier to just cast a post into the ether and wait for replies. Reddit IMO is probably the lowest quality discussion zone and having my posts mined by AI for profit really bothers me.
- OldGuyInTheClub 3y agoI have a few trusted people I can email. If there is something outside their expertise, they will forward my message to others they trust. In exchange I try not to waste their time and never contact their associates separately.
- ggm 3y agoThis. but slack. Morally the same space. People who understand my neologisms or malapropisms and know how to say "no, that's not an outer left join" nicely without "RTFM" getting too harsh
- OldGuyInTheClub 3y agoIt is getting increasingly harder to find TFM these days.
- renewiltord 3y agoIronically, lobsters is great so long as you ignore every `culture` tag using the filters https://lobste.rs/filters https://lobste.rs/filters I have the following filtered: - culture - rant - privacy I think those ones are usually full of people saying the same stuff over and over again.
- Karrot_Kream 3y agoLobsters is too focused around PLs, systems coding, and FOSS politics for my tastes. The content in other computing niches is just too cursory to be interesting.
- renewiltord 3y agoThat is true. I think it's because of the small community. I am working on something with a friend so I can apply similar filtering to HN. HN has a good mass of people and some smart people but it's got a lot of repetitive LLM-style content. Once it is done, I think I shall be happy.
- Karrot_Kream 3y agoLet me know when you have something going. I'd be interested.
- nextlevelwizard 3y agoLove the top comment about discussion being done by "midwits" and then unironically suggesting /g/ as discussion place. This is best trolling I've seen in a while.
- endorphine 3y agoI'm surprised noone mentioned IRC (Libera, OFTC).
- sph 3y agoI wouldn't know which channels to hang on on IRC these days. For the past 10 years even populated channels are a ghost town of join and leave notices, and not any discussion.
- specproc 3y ago> On Reddit and other fora, we have heavy bias towards people that have the time to goof around on forums instead of, you know, doing things. Burn. I should log and get some work done.
- vouaobrasil 3y ago> So where do you go when you want to geek out? This may be a pessimistic take, but computer stuff I believe has lost the allure that it once had, and here is why I think so: At one point, computer stuff meant being a hacker, having the hacker ethic, which personally to me translated into figuring out how stuff worked and putting it together to do something useful. And, "something useful" to me meant creating something and showing it off to other people. I still remember in high school when I hacked together a paint program in some interpreted language that had built-in primitive graphics. Computer-related stuff meant also doing good things for the world, like transmitting useful information over the internet and discussing things. Nowadays, "computer stuff" is a lot different. Yeah, computers have gotten way more powerful, but computer stuff is now 99% about commoditizing and big-tech abstracting everything away into a process that is just about selling junk people don't need and manipulating the basic psychological processes of human beings for the sake of their own growth. It's about behemoth, high-level abstractions that take away the basic joy of learning, and the main philosophy that pervades computers today is that they are a tool to supply sugar-level media consumption in return for commercial engagement. Companies like Google, Apple, Microsoft, IBM, and others are the result of a late-stage technological development fuelled only by greed, and it's left the computer landscape soulless, metallic, and empty. Unfortunately, people became aware of just how commercializable computers were and we've milked it dry like a cow that needs to be pumped full of drugs to keep going. So no thanks. I left computer science as my job this year, and while I still enjoy writing a cool algorithm in Python, I'm much happier for it and don't talk about computers any more.
- itisit 3y agoThat’s just it: computing is ordinary and in most cases a commodity. Same as petroleum, wheat, and gold. When business normalizes around a commodity, all the excitement, novelty, and wonder is lost. Consumers demand it, suppliers crank it out. Who cares? Don’t get me wrong. I’m grateful the staples are always there on the proverbial shelf. But am I enthusiastically interested and passionate about that?
- rkagerer 3y agoI view their failure to put users first as a giant opportunity for someone else to come along and do a better job.
- xwdv 3y agoIf there was a better place for discussing computer related stuff, I’d be there instead of on hackernews. That said, we can’t really talk about computers all the time. There’s only so much one can say about computers, therefore it becomes inevitable that we pass the time in between computer topics by discussing other subjects, but always from pro-computer type perspectives. Or even anti-computer perspectives, which are still computer related. The one thing we don’t seem to tolerate here is tech illiterates and magical thinking.
- jasonjmcghee 3y agoI'd be interested to join Lobste.rs- those of you on the platform, how did you go about joining?
- runjake 3y agoWhat’s your email? I’ll send you an invite. Edit: sent to hi@
- coffeemug 3y agoI would appreciate an invite-- I've been looking for a smaller programming-oriented community. My email is in my profile.
- kaeruct 3y agoWould you send me an invite as well? Email in profile. Thanks in advance :)
- codedeadlock 3y agoHi - If possible can you send me the invite too? Would really appreciate it. Thanks!
- robjan 3y agoWould really appreciate an invite if you don't mind. My email is hi@[username].com
- itherseed 3y agoHi, I'm interested in an invitation too, would appreciate it. Mail in the profile, thanks in advance.
- jasonjmcghee 3y agoHey, I really appreciate that. Feel free to email me directly if you'd like to chat, otherwise, I'll see you around the community.
- s777 3y agoHi, I'm also interested in an invitation if you have any left (my email is in my profile)
- 1982237711 3y ago[flagged]
- Karrot_Kream 3y agoI just join the Matrix rooms and Discords associated with projects I enjoy. People there usually discuss adjacent projects as well and the nature of people coming to discuss the project keeps the chatter deep and focused. One topic I enjoy is networking and distributed systems and for that, the #yggdrasil:matrix.org room is great. It's centered around the Yggdrasil mesh overlay network. The Nix Matrix room is also a great way to learn about systems coding and all sorts of gotchas when it comes to reproducible builds.
- LanternLight83 3y agoAs an aside, I've been using my device's Ygg addresses to punch NAT instead of opening ports or learning tailscale and it's been a pleasure, thx to everyone who makes thin stuff work
- Roark66 3y agoIt depends what do you want to discuss. There are lots of subject forums that are still thriving. Arch Linux forum, Debian Linux forum, for Microsoft stuff you have "Microsoft community" (not that I ever used it, but I read it sometimes in ancient past). For vintage computer stuff you have vcfed.org and vogons.org (BTW, I find it hilarious vogons will not show up in Google searches, unless you know it, it doesn't exist). Then you have the youtube comments on channels like ltt etc.
- arlcode 3y agoOffline by meeting people in person. Not everybody has time for that and you won't get all the information out there, but for me it's been always very enlightening meeting smart and knowledable people for a beer a talk. Usually such discussions don't end in heated debates where everybody walks away miserable, but switch to other unrelated topics or simply end when everything useful is ssaid. I've had great success with hackerspaces and other off work meetups. Not all night hackathons anymore but just a few people spending a relaxing evening talking about tech and other stuff. If it's informal enough with no expectation of attendance it also works for people with families and other obligations.
- swah 3y agoKinda unrelated but youtube comments still give me the old internet vibe I associate with forums, usenet, etc. I think its the lower quality / lower barrier to participate, to be honest.