For certain topics, mailing lists seem to be where the high S/N ratio currently is, although in some cases that's been true since the '90s. Almost all free-soft

For certain topics, mailing lists seem to be where the high S/N ratio currently is, although in some cases that's been true since the '90s. Almost all free-software projects that once used a newsgroup as their primary public discussion venue now have a mailing list, for example. And some professional specialties and academic disciplines have a widely subscribed mailing list for people in the field. The downside there is that it can sometimes be hard to figure out where exactly people in a field talk, since there's no central, browsable index. Sometimes it's a professional society like one of the ACM SIGs running the list, sometimes it's a university, sometimes a nonprofit or a big conference, and sometimes just some random listserv that accreted enough subscribers to become a de facto hub.