Best online communities for software developers
thehiveindex.com
thehiveindex.com
I haven't found a great answer for the question of community these days, outside of checking in on the blogs and newsletters of various developers. I'll have to check Code Project out though.
I like /r/coding but it's pretty dead and sometimes /r/scala will have decent blog posts. Also /r/hnblogs is very decent, but extremely slow, for insightful posts as well.
/r/homelab (I've dipped my toes into occasionally) has people who are passionate about their craft. The people who are interested in setting up a homelab are also likewise interested in investing (time and money) in it.
This differs from things like /r/learnprogramming where the people posting are not invested in it (the community or the craft).
Another difference would be the "who contributes new posts" aspect. With /r/homelab new posts come from people of all skill levels. With /r/learnprogramming they come from people who are at the very basic skill level.
The implications of this is that /r/homelab has peers helping peers while /r/learnprogramming needs people who aren't posting questions to post comments and provide additional material.
Same goes for comments, bad comments get downvoted and greyed out quickly, whereas great comments get elevated.
It's just a thought, I rarely use them but compared to most of the web it seems like a saner substrate
Is there a collection of communities that aren't hosted by corporations?
Downvote me to hell, but best communities I hang out in are far from shiny/hip/popular, and this is why they are good.
The one downside I’d point out is that language channels tend to be filled with purists, of the, “ you shouldn’t want to do that” variety.
Before StackOverflow was founded and became a thing, Freenode IRC was my primary source of help when I encountered issues in open source tools. I have learnt a lot from the #debian, ##math, and #not-math channels, especially.
Some of my favourite channels on Freenode IRC include #lisp, #emacs, and #python. They have great communities with many regulars who have great attitude. These channels are also quite friendly to beginners. I still remember an interesting incident from 2006 when I posted a mathematics question to one of the channels. The channel was mostly quiet. After about 15 minutes, I got detailed answers from multiple members of the channel. 20 minutes or so later, I saw others posting Python questions to the same channel. That is when I realized that I had inadvertently posted a mathematics question in the #python channel. :)
> EDAboard.com is an international Electronic Discussion Forum focused on EDA software, circuits, schematics, books, theory, papers, asic, pld, 8051, DSP, Network, RF, Analog Design, PCB, Service Manuals... and a whole lot more!
It used to be the case that niche techs and business domains could provide a rallying point for those heavily-involved where you would see familiar names and could even get to know them a bit.
In the age of million-member fora with much wider scope like the above, that's just not something that is as easy; communities are more difficult to form around a tag.
Stack Overflow operates at a much larger scale and compared to Stack Overflow, these communities are definitely much smaller but I see that as an advantage. The quality of discussions is often pretty good. Off-topic friendly banter occurs once in a while when the channels are quiet. With a good percentage of the members composed of regulars in these channels, they are still able to maintain a sense of community.
Most of the content is closer to set and forget, or set and debate. If you think of your _actual_ living communities, you might know your neighbor, and you might communicate with them about things when you see them. You might feel fondly towards them (of course, you might not). With these online forums, that doesn't really happen (ignoring celebrity accounts). It seems rare to remember someone's username and/or communicate with them frequently or outside of the forum itself.
I think if you are seeking community as I described above, HN and Reddit are fundamentally not about that thing. Maybe I'm in the minority, or maybe that's not how other people think, but it's definitely how I've used and seen others use Reddit/HN over the past decade.
I was privy to the results of a good quality private study some years back when I was briefly the lead moderator for, iirc, the oldest community on a particular topic on the internet. The study was done internally by the very talented founder.
They found that 20 percent of members were active and regular users, 10 percent posted once or only occasionally, and the rest lurked.
Twenty percent is one fifth. If you multiply 150 by 5, you get 750. It has been my observation that when small online communities hit 750 members, they start having issues and needing to differentiate and/or formalize, which fits neatly with the above two piece of data.
The way humans deal with larger groups than that is formalization. Having formal customs and what not so you don't really need to personally know an individual to have a recipe for how to successfully interact with them is how people cope with having to interact with people they will never know well.
Hacker News has done a good job of formalizing certain things and that keeps the signal-to-noise ratio high here even though the sense of community it once had when it was smaller is no longer something it seems to have.
A subreddit can become a community, but you would need to keep it small. It might also help to make it private.
I hypothesize that you could foster more of a sense of community for HN by expanding the leader board to 150 names.
> Hacker News has done a good job of formalizing certain things and that keeps the signal-to-noise ratio high here even though the sense of community it once had when it was smaller is no longer something it seems to have.
Yeah, I think that this is essential to a successful forum but also brings up exactly what the issue is, I think. If you're optimizing for signal to noise, you're already beyond the scope of "community", in that you've already got too many people and too much content to ingest. Optimizing signal to noise on a forum is great with the microblog/RSS lens I apply, because it means I'm not seeing offtopic or irrelevant content in my feeds.
I also kinda think that a part of community (when thinking about community being defined as a group of people that are connected and feel involved in eachother's lives to varying extents) _is_ offtopic conversation. "How are you doing?" "How's your grandpa", etc. You can't allow this type of post/behavior on HN, because if you open those floodgates you're getting way too much noise to handle, but I also think that's why the shift has gone the way it's gone. You can't learn about eachother beyond subject matter that's attached to the topic of an individual post.
They do a great job at building communities though.
In the last few months there’s even steady amount of posts with “Come and see my YouTube” kind of approach, which is tragic. :/
Generally speaking, I spend the majority of my time actually working on my project. It's hard to get involved.
Even then, I'm on Hacker News (obviously) but don't take time to write out really great comments like patio11, etc. I'm also on Indie Hackers, but really only reply to threads based on suggestions I get from curated emails. Otherwise, I'm on quite a few subreddits, as well as a ton of discord and slack channels. I'm also on Twitter, but don't know how to really contribute there either.
I'm quite the generalist, and I'm really into Rails, Svelte, Flutter, Godot, and bootstrapping/indie projects.
How do you all find the time to be involved anywhere?
The section that I did find ("Security and Cryptography" in "General Programming") seemed more geared towards crypto - there was even a subsection for Steganography (?!). I actually think this is a bit concerning given that C++ is one of the most discussed languages on the platform...
EDIT: There is actually a Web Security section, but none for desktop development (or any other section, including development lifecycle)
For South Africans, try zatech.co.za :)
Irc
Some gitter channels