Inevitably, a shift in culture/moderation/interests with cause me to seek out new communities. HN has been fairly consistent in it's discussion since I've joined, and I'd like to find some similar sites.
It's like Reddit for thoughtful content, no fluff.
And so far it's full of hackers and people who think like hackers.
Email the founder for an invite code. He's friendly and engaged.
tildes looks interesting but the founder says, "it will also never be described as anything like "an absolute free speech site".
i would love to find a community that moderates harrassment, actual hate speech, and threats, but nothing else. for example ive seen comments deleted here on hn related to drug culture, presumably because a drug is illegal in the usa.
in other words, a community interested in truth, no matter how messy it is.
The founder was kicked out of YC.
I've never actually read it, since its insistence on "absolute free speech" just causes it to be overrun by the worst users that no other service wants.
It sounds like tilde here is just being honest. They likely do minimal moderation.
what you describe is basically just Reddit, but with the people nobody wants to talk to on Reddit ... so mostly just the people you don't want to talk to on Reddit talking to each other,which has no mass appeal
I personally seek the most undesirable opinions in the depths of the worst comment sections - because there's knowledge about the world to be gleaned from all of that that I'll use as a competitive advantage against someone who couldn't be bothered to read something "icky" for a few seconds.
Competitive advantage?
What secret wisdom, exactly, do you think the racists, pedos and trolls of the web possess and casually discuss that would give you anything of the sort?
People already know what such groups believe and how little value they add to society. They're not the fucking Illuminati, and you're not breaking new ground by seeking them out.
I use HN with showdead on by default, and I sometimes post a userscript for people to uncensor comments and I've complained about the greying out of downvoted comments often ... I understand wanting to read everything and make your own decisions about what's worth reading rather than have others make them for you. However, most of what winds up flagged deserves to be.
Look at the flagged comment at the bottom of this thread, for example. It's just a rant against the "global socialist LEFT." There's nothing there that no one has read before. Even if you agree with the "validity" of the opinion, it's just stereotypical anti-leftist edgelord nonsense.
And now and then, albeit rarely, perfectly legitimate and inoffensive comments do get flagged. I try to vouch them when I can. But even then, I have yet to see anything I'd consider a true jewel in the rough.
There seems to be a trend among people to consider content that goes against the establishment to be inherently more valuable than that which goes with it, as if offensiveness maps to truth. Seek the bottom of the barrel out if you want, but I think it's a mistake to expect enlightenment from it.
I'm not saying alternative viewpoints and free speech sites are all sugar and flowers, because they often are filled with deplorable content. I do feel, however, that they serve a purpose in providing alternatives to the corporate.
the real reason free speech forums don't exist isn't because "nobody" would use it. i suspect its merely the safest thing to do legally. nobody wants to get sued for some controversial content. simple as that.
Almost every thread about $site's moderation policy devolves into arguments about whether "actual hate speech" even exists (there are people who consider what other people consider hate speech to be "messy truth" after all), or whether any form of moderation can exist on a site that claims to support free speech.
The standard you're setting isn't an unrealized ideal - it's how many online communities already work, and those communities are still rejected because the boundaries they set are inevitably boundaries others consider intolerable.
There are few, if any, sites on the open web which allow "absolute free speech" because that, by definition, would allow hate speech, threats, open discussion of pedophilia and and other illegal activity. And honestly, almost no one wants that except the assholes, pedos and criminals. Even setting the bar to "anything, so long as it isn't illegal" is tricky, because legality varies from place to place, and the site owner is bound to follow the laws of wherever the server is (AFAIK.)
> example ive seen comments deleted here on hn related to drug culture, presumably because a drug is illegal in the usa
I've seen plenty of pro-drug content here, and people discussing their use openly. I doubt there is widespread censorship on that basis, more likely someone was being uncivil. Although arguably requiring civility is, itself, a kind of censorship.
Also, threads here are never actually deleted, just marked as dead. You can still see them with showdead turned on.
it's fine for hn to exist and cater to this group, right? yet here, humor, satire, and a variety of "OK" things to discuss and share are considered off-topic and not permitted.
just like when hn started and people thought it would just turn into reddit, i do think its possible for a forum where free speech is celebrated to not turn into a nazi club.
i'm glad we have law abiding individuals in society. but make no mistake, laws and morals are not equal, and indeed if we cannot have a space to discuss things that are illegal but possibly moral, we're talking dystopia
There are plenty of spaces to discuss such things, but not every space is obliged to play by those rules. And if you can't find one, nothing is stopping you from making one.
At the end of the day, every site is a petty dictatorship. That's true for HN, Reddit, Voat, 4chan, 8chan, the deep web, the dark web, wherever - whomever owns the site makes the rules and has arbitrary control over the content (unless the law says otherwise, or regardless of the law in some cases.) But not even the big social media silos control the entire thing. Google might derank my site, but they can't take it off the web (assuming they don't host it, somehow.) My hosting provider might take my site off the web, but I can find another.
I don't think we're anywhere near dystopia yet.
isn't there room for something simpler?
for example here on HN, was a discussion about staying motivated to work on challenging stuff. a comment about cocaine was deleted. well, the truth is, plenty of lawyers straight-up depend on that stuff, the way programmers depend on JAVA. why is this comment deleted? because it's bad? illegal? might tempt some kids to try it and ruin their life? whatever the reason for the censorship, the truth is being hidden aka “showdead".
so there are a couple of inter-related things going on here that i'd love to see addressed by a community, if not this community:
1. transparency. lobsters does this well. if there is going to be moderation and censorship, be transparent about it, and about why its happening. every change a mod makes on lobsters includes a "commit message" explaining the action. conversely users on hn get banned and may not even know..
2. free speech is about more than providing a space for neo-nazis and trolls and otherwise people who belong in jail or segregated from society. i think the analog is the academic vs the corporate world. we have scientists using up public money to think about stuff that may never have any actual value to society. but we enshrine their ability to do that work because its necessary in order to make discoveries. similarly, actual thought, genuine knowledge, which should be the end-goal of any discussion that is not merely rhetoric, ought to be concerned with arriving at some kind of truth or truthful conclusion. we can't do that if we are too broad with our censorship, as evidenced with the cocaine comment. pretending cocaine doesn't exist doesn't make you right when everything you've read says that tea is the most powerful stimulant.
3. to krapps point about petty dictators -- yes, indeed, and that's important so that communities can have identities and topics and focus and not just decay into noise. but it seems that providers -- you mention google, hosting companies, ISPs, etc -- all play it safe, and are absolutely not interested in participating in the free speech debate at all. thus they are very much gatekeepers. no, you cannot get popular online while being blacklisted on google, or kicked around from one host to another (at least it must be an order of magnitude more difficult, esp for niche communities). even self-hosting is not really a viable option. academic institutions are an option here, but i do worry about it changing in the future.
I think it depends a lot on how you discuss things.
I'm a demographic outlier. I often stick out like a sore thumb. I've had to work at figuring HN out. It didn't come naturally.
I try to not take things too personally and to remember it's a forum with a whole lot of traffic, so you are occasionally going to get downvotes or not great replies just due to "laws of large numbers" kind of thing.
Only posts removed are spam and felonies.
To request an invite to the Tildes alpha, email invites@tildes.net. Do not email any other addresses to ask for an invite.
https://www.reddit.com/r/tildes/comments/aojrd0/official_inv...
Russian hacker community; this year they started an English version of the website (announcement: https://habr.com/en/company/tm/blog/435764/).
Slashdot.org is still around
Metafilter.org is still going
http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/
since nobody helped, it's the closest you get, surprisingly there are much less wrappers for Slashdot than HN
https://www.echojs.com - HN for Javascript http://www.datatau.com - HN for data science.
The aim is to allow developers to create their own channel for the project they are working on. The developers can then post about their project or idea under the "general" channel to invite others to their channel for participating in their project or idea.
Here is the invite: https://tinyurl.com/ybongxl2 in case you want to join.
It's been constant quality since it's existence
It is a project I've been following and seems pretty interesting. A federated reddit alternative, part of the fediverse.
It's a fledgling community for social entrepreneurs. (full disclosure: I started the site).
It has yet to gain traction, but HN is what prompted me start this in the social impact space.
I found mewe has a couple of good groups. They're a bit small, but some really smart, nice people in them
Also, tacking /comments on to your subreddit url will show the most recent comments. This is pretty handy for finding the conversations in otherwise slow subreddits.
"laarc is a tech mashup of Hacker News and Reddit by two long time fans of both forums.
The initial impetus behind the site is a desire to try to recapture the early spirit of Hacker News. HN currently has about 5 million visitors a month. It's different than it was back in the day when it was a much smaller group of people.
We're aiming for a cross between Pinboard and HN: a central place for all your bookmarks, with the ability to make private submissions. (pg mentioned that he used HN for all of YC's internal software in the early days; it's handy to have a place to keep all of your notes!)"
Some technical differences:
It uses tags to try to categorize stuff somewhat. Unlike on HN, your threads page also has links to your posts, a feature I requested probably at a point where it was basically me and the guy coding it up kicking around ideas for a forum.
It's grown substantially in a short period of time, but it's still very new and if you want to shape a forum into a place with the kinds of discussion that interests you, it's an opportunity to do that.
Isn't it literally just HN users who know about it from here and the Arc forum?
We see ourselves as complimentary to HN. HN is a wonderful community and I've made some dear friends for life here.
That said, some diffs:
1. The codebase is MIT licensed (per pg) and freely available: https://bit.ly/2E318hq
2. Submissions go straight to the front page. This won't last, but everyone has shown restraint and good taste so far. If something catches your interest and teaches us about the world, it's probably a good fit for the site; go ahead and submit it.
3. You can tag stories as whatever you want. Some of my favorites are:
essays|classics: https://bit.ly/2BrIoqo
!dev&!programming&!news: https://bit.ly/2GgGw7O
videos: https://bit.ly/2UPPagM
4. We have an active feature requests thread, and it's not uncommon for features to be implemented within a few hours after being requested: https://bit.ly/2THTgrb
5. Easter eggs!
- We just launched /l/place, a clone of reddit's old r/place. It's written in Arc: https://bit.ly/2UNwwpP
(Every pixel is a form with a submit button. Arc is awesome.)
- Chess easter egg: https://bit.ly/2thqlPc
- HTTP status code 418: I'm a teapot https://bit.ly/2GjRYQ2
- Terry Davis used to post to HN with "God says... {a bunch of random words}." One of his last comments revealed the script he used to generate those: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15609972
#!/bin/bash
#This prints random words from the Linux dictionary.
echo "$(shuf -n 32 /usr/share/dict/words --random-source=/dev/urandom | tr '\n' ' ')"
I listen to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oY33uoBSw3w a lot. I wish I'd started the site sooner, so that Terry would've had a place to chat with people. Even youtube nuked his account.
6. We're developing an iOS app that you can pre-alpha test: https://bit.ly/2tev6cf
Some WIP screenshots: https://bit.ly/2SMFpmt
The app is pretty great for reading HN as well, so we're hoping to maybe offer both a site reader and an HN reader.
We have an Android plan too.
7. Much of the community hangs out in our Discord server: https://bit.ly/2URZcOx (There are some top-shelf programming memes in the #silliness channel. Feel free to append to it.)
8. Private submissions. If you submit to /l/private, no one can see the submission except you. I've been using the site as a personal bookmarking service, and I find myself using it more often than Pinboard nowadays. https://bit.ly/2WURqW0
(There's still the question of how to import 4,000 bookmarks from pinboard. not sure yet. https://bit.ly/2BulZsu)
--
Some similarities:
1. You can search comments and stories: https://bit.ly/2GypaCN
2. The community's growth curve aims to match HN's early growth curve. The tail is about equal now:
(pg on twitter: "The graph is the right shape".)
3. A vibrant community with quality conversation. You might like burntsushi's comment about his two-way string matching studies: https://bit.ly/2TE6VPT
4. You can show your projects and ask the community whatever you want. (The only threshold for a Show submission is that you have to have put significant work into whatever you're showing. That said, you don't need to have something for people to play with. It can be an idea you've been working on, an unfinished side project, or a full product launch.)