Ask HN: Where do you go for real conversations on the internet?
Feels like social media has too low of signal-to-noise ratio.
Where else should you look to have real conversations about topics you care about online?
Where else should you look to have real conversations about topics you care about online?
This is also a great trick for figuring out really obscure problems by the way. Error message returning no results when you Google it? Slack and discord aren't crawled by search engines (sadly). Join the relevant channel and search there. Very often you'll get the result you were looking for.
Haven't been very active on these platforms but maybe its time to explore what is out there.
Nice trick, Thanks!
Haven't looked into it but I wonder whether it is technically possible to start crawling public Slack/Discord channels or they are off-limits by design.
A thought I have had before is that a person could download let's say, the 10,000 most popular books and all college textbooks they could find, wire up slack and discord's search api for good channels you know of, and then index it, use bibliographies and references to other books as page rank, and use something like elasticsearch to query it. You would have built a search engine that probably felt like it was made out of magic.
I think the guy who wrote grep used it for a couple years before sharing it. I imagine it would be like that lol "how does that guy always find shit so fast!?"
The real bummer of that thought experiment is that Google actually tried to do that years back with Google books but was ultimately stopped by the publishing industry. Would have been pretty cool.
Edit: while writing this comment I couldn't remember the exact details of the lawsuit. I looked it up and it turns out I was wrong! Google actually won that lawsuit years later.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authors_Guild,_Inc._v._Googl....
And yet when I hit play on my current audiobook and searched the next sentence I didn't get any results from Google or Google books. Maybe Google gave up on the project or it's just very slow going. In any case, it would appear there is actually a path for at least half of that idea.
Interesting idea!
For some reason it seems that books can be really tricky. With that said, Google does have a books API[1] that I played with in an earlier project.
I guess that explains why there haven't been any real competitors to Goodreads even people complain about how terrible is the service all over the internet.
Related to books, few days ago this app[2] was trending on HN which I thought was pretty cool.
I also keep in touch with two buddies from junior high, we write nearly every day in a Messenger group.
I also have a Signal group with couple of close friends where we discuss all sort of topics in depth. Really enjoy the conversations but I imagine it is difficult to scale that.