Ask HN: Great online communities?

It's a great question. I also would love to unearth an intelligent community where discourse isn't limited to growth hacking, jQuery plugins, and startup pivoting. HN is the closet I get, but people here tend not to take intellectual risks and experiment with creating new thought paradigms.

Don't get me wrong, there are some tremendously bright people here who I learn a lot from. but the Reddit-esque social dynamics (ie, karma, hivemind,) tend to put safety pads on anything remotely radical or risky discussed here. Quora can actually have some pretty interesting content, but, again, there's similar reputation management going on that prevents discourse from elevating to being somewhat interesting and important.

http://www.datatau.com/ - for data scientists

https://www.designernews.co/ - for designers

http://www.webdesignernews.com/ - for web designers

https://growthhackers.com/welcome - growthhackers

Then of course there's a sleuth of subreddits.... similar to HN would be

https://www.reddit.com/r/startup

If you are looking for something different, there is a tool that lets you create online communities like HN or Reddit, so you can create your own.

http://www.hellobox.co

Quite a few communities on it are

http://www.chitchats.co/ - community to share interesting Slack chatrooms

http://tools.robingood.com/ - curated list of tech tools