Ask HN: Where do you hang out virtually online?
This has created a bit of tension mentally for me. The feeling of being caged up with no physical cage.
There was a Slack group for startups by Jason a while back, but that looks to have died off.
This has created a bit of tension mentally for me. The feeling of being caged up with no physical cage.
There was a Slack group for startups by Jason a while back, but that looks to have died off.
Maybe on EFnet and other legacy networks but more modern ircds support host cloaks for preserving pseudonymity.
And if we're talking about real anonymity, lots of the internet is blocked off if you use TOR, whether by the site itself or some cloudflare or whatever CDN or hosting service.
My original point was that IRC/Usenet would most likely be similarly cancerous if it had the same popularity. I remember sadly the end of Usenet when the moderators just couldn't keep up any more with all the spam, scams and people with no clue.
The same thing is true for Disaster Radio, SudoMesh and other mesh networks...you use the technology to talk about the technology, coordinate growth and goof around with inside jokes.
I'd be surprised if soon electric cars (...domestic robots, razor crest spacecrafts) didn't all have internal forums where folks talked about the technology itself.
So the question is what are you interested in connecting with people about? Robotics clubs have a different needs for interacting than say the folks interested in the Gemini protocol.
(hopefully Musk's planet-covering nodes will make the internet ubiquitous even out in the ocean...)
Some IRC channels have moved to Telegram, a few larger communities over to Discord.
I still associate Slack strongly with work stuff and don't really want to have any non-work related things on there.
XKCD has their own IRC channel(s) too: https://xkcd.com/about/
https://discord.multiprocess.io for the invite
I also just started a virtual monthly hacker night where hobbyists and professionals give talks on any of the above topics (anything tech internals, really).
I'm looking for more speakers. If you want to do a lightning talk or 20-30m talk let me know what you're interested in talking about!
meetup.com/hackernights or multiprocess.io/hackernights/
I don't like Reddit's culture. Twitter seems like people shouting into the void. Hacker News attracts psuedointellectuals. IRC seems to have too many channels with 80% idling. Discord is for close friends but not great for discovery.
I want something like forums where I can post a topic, but also maybe chat to drop in and talk with folks if people are around and want to hang out.
I hate like/dislike systems and karma. I want to be able to say whatever I want within reason without some nerds downvoting something they disagree with. Old forums were great for this, because you had to actually read and think for yourself.
I think there are novel social platforms that could be explored, but I don't see anyone working on them.
No voting and each post has a chatroom built into it, for topical live convo w/low friction, in active development!
Major projects i interact with (kernel, kde, rustlang, mozilla, etc) all have "rooms" in matrix with a considerable quorum (not as good as irc, not as empty as other places)
Earlier it felt like a wasteland but now it is starting to come alive. In particular https://matrix.to/#/#activitypub-community:codelutin.com is a nice overview of what happens in the federated space. (If you open it in Element, right click the icon in the left margin and click "Explore rooms") to see what I'm talking about.
I don't do chat or anything synchronous like that because it doesn't fit into the way my free time is sliced into small chunks by family commitments.
My reddit homepage while logged in is COMPLETELY different from what it is while logged out. And I use multiple accounts to group interests/homepages and retain some anonymity.
I also use old.reddit.com because the new (or maybe not-so-new but newER) site is still so f***ing annoying.
Regarding the "toxic wastelands" - while there are plenty of those - my main pet peeve with subreddit growth is just the lower standards and decline in quality.
A book/game subreddit with interesting discussions about themes, characters and plot changes into endless "look at this <blanket|cake|...> my <relative> made me for <holiday>".
Technical subreddits go from low volume, high quality original projects to "hey look I just bought an arduino and blinked a led".
Maybe I'm just a grumpy old fart but save that stuff for your Facebook wall. This can probably be fixed with strong moderation, but I've rarely seen that work.
I think that's just regression to the mean and inevitable as any community grows.
For any small community to get traction, it must be particularly compelling to rise above network effects of existing entrenched communities. Small mediocre communities simply disappear. So every small community that grows starts out better than average.
But as the community grows it attracts a wider range of members. The aggregation algorithms that determine what threads show up then optimize for lowest common denominator content that appeals to that wider demographic. And the members themselves, just by virtue of statistics, on aggregate end up less interesting or engaging than the small core that were so much better than average that they got the community off the ground.
It makes me a little sad when communities get watered down as they grow, but I accept it as a natural side effect of growth and not some sort of moral failure of its participants.
I do sometimes fantasize about trying to build some sort of social media thing that deliberately puts an upper limit on community sizes to see how that would effect quality.
My only complaint about reddit is more about how some of the smaller hobby based subs just turn in to mini instagram's about the new gear someone got, or just random content with no discussion. My favorites are the ones where the comments are filled with discussions about techniques, how OP accomplished something, etc... /r/leatherworking was/is a great example.
Some of my personal favorite subreddits based on interests:
https://www.reddit.com/r/programming
https://www.reddit.com/r/startups
https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful
https://www.reddit.com/r/Aquariums
https://www.reddit.com/r/cyberDeck
https://www.reddit.com/r/functionalprint
https://www.reddit.com/r/MechanicalKeyboards
https://www.reddit.com/r/onewheel
https://www.reddit.com/r/ElectricScooters
https://www.reddit.com/r/mechanicalpencils
https://www.reddit.com/r/fountainpens
https://www.reddit.com/r/mechanicalheadpens
Seriously, the quality of the subreddit is directly tied to the quality of the mods. I was a mod on my old hometown's subreddit, and it was a daily slog of removing shitposts, political content, and conspiracy theories. The end result was a relatively clean and useful subreddit.
Additionally, I'd recommend using an app like Apollo instead of the official Reddit app. It's just a better experience overall.
TBH my weekly online poker game with buddies keeps me sane.
It's refreshing to see how many other people are dealing with it and to know that none of us are alone!
In my opinion it's a month to be especially sensitive to others and especially mindful of your own emotional state.
Something about the short days or months of cold or something.
No accident Valentines Day is that month imo.
An assortment of pubnixes (I run one[1]! Well, technically only me atm, but others are welcome.), and an IRC network.
Edit: If one is interested, they should note that the tildeverse has a different culture than much of HN, and you should be aware of and respect that.
The culture definitely overlaps some with HN, but the main difference I've noticed is that people on the Tildeverse rarely care how "useful" something is. I've seen some complaining about HN, especially with regards to something Tilde-related being posted to HN and then lambasted - I believe the specific example was Gemini.
So in short: Part of HN lines up, part doesn't. People in tilde's tend to be more driven by software lining up with their personal ethics than on HN, and they tend to dislike anything capital driven afaict.
Twitter can be exactly this, but you have to put in some work to curate your follow list. You also have to be quick to unfollow anyone who turns out to be spammy or picking fights all of the time. If you just let your follow list grow unbounded, the quality of Twitter goes way down. If you follow and unfollow all the time, you can get a fairly interesting Twitter feed full of people sharing projects and discussing ideas.
But its not just twitter thats being manipulated and today we have algo's analysing everything making automated decisions, after all thats what cyber warfare is as discussed here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29896985 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29872227 https://www.siliconrepublic.com/enterprise/twitter-botnets-r...
Things have got even better now since this guardian article was written. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/mar/17/us-spy-op...
Look at #PartyGate with Boris Johnson for a recent example. It does make changes, the police are now forced to investigate the Govt & politicians!
I dont think you realise how much people are manipulated consciously and subconsciously.
R.I.P Twitter for me; haven't touched it in over 2 years.
Unfollow those people. It doesn't make any sense to follow a lot of people and then get angry about the content they're posting.
Like I said, if you let your follow list grow unbounded and you never go back and remove people, you'll eventually be flooded with content you don't want to see.
See someone posting politics and topics you prefer to avoid? Unfollow.
There are a lot of great people in the technical world that put their opinions on non-technical subjects out there
Of course the name doesn't help, but it isn't impossible to join if you don't have one.
The Hubs team has been consistently shipping new features, and just posted 3X new roles a couple weeks ago.
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/activity-6886711377419870210-...
It takes inspiration from irc/aim/twitter and packages it in a way I wanted to use personally and didn't find available.
Happy to discuss what I've learned through building it! (blog post imminent)
It's an antidote for the curated, ad profile targeted, walled garden web we've slowly constructed around ourselves. They have a saying: "don't forget, you're here forever." 16 years later ...
16 years later ...
It took me around five years of online language practice to become bilingual. To each his/her own, and maybe I'm some kind of elitist, but I personally wouldn't trade that for five years of exposure to racial slurs and memes about bodily functions.> It's also given me a thick skin in online discussions. I've been called every insult in the dictionary.
That's something I can't understand too. Most of my discussions there are relatively civil. Most of the time when things start getting polarized discussions get not constructive at all, but this is true of HN too. There are lots of insult thrown around but it always goes both ways and it's easy to avoid it.
If you're still enjoying it, more power to ya! I sometimes still miss it myself, and whenever I drop by I remember both why I spent so much time there and why I left. Just a fair warning to anyone who might want to give it a try. That saying isn't kidding... it really does stay with you forever.
Earlier I have dabbled in Mastodon but they seems doggedly insistent on recreating the same problems that Twitter had (everything public, subscribing to the whole person, not just interests).
These days Matrix is finally (IMO, some might have enjoyed it a while already) shaping up nicely (again IMO).
Discussions sometimes turned contentious, but it raised good questions deserving of more formal research, especially in terms of balancing tradeoffs (is getting less of X worth getting more Y?). I had what I call the "practioner's" viewpoint, which conflicted with what I'll call the "academic" viewpoint. We practioners viewed it more from a business expense standpoint while the academics wanted to build what seemed like an overly idealistic model of the domain and/or world. I didn't find such realistic without producing a million clones of Sheldon Cooper, but removing his arrogance so that he could work in teams.
However Ward Cunningham eventually pulled the plug on the wiki (it's read-only now), partly to experiment with a "federated" version of it (which is a failure in my opinion), and because he got tired of cleaning up after a nasty vandal. I think the vandal issue was solvable without shutting the whole thing down, but that's another story.
The link is here: https://t.me/+pwdYcfBiV1I3Njll
I have started with the comments, and I have a similar motive to have a group to share ideas and discussions without being dogmatic. It stays closed and private, and you can have a nice forum for an idea exchange. I haven't used Slack or Discord. The success of building a community depends on either doing it in private or keeping the bar high for those joining in. It takes considerable effort to succeed with that objective. In my mechanical keyboards group, most users stay quiet. At any given point, there are a few active members anywhere.
Most users prefer to consume content passively. That should change, because everyone's perspective matters. .
The other ones mainly have tech-related channels for specific projects, but can still be entertaining. Also useful when you need help with something.
Why mention it at all?
If gmail could keep topics to a single email conversation thread under one subject line (not 40 that go on like RE:RE:RE:RE:RE:RE:RE:RE:FWD:FWD:REE:EEEEEE), OR if there was some sort of platform that could take all these emails (aggregate from groups.io, mailman, piper, etc) and transform into a reddit/HN/tumblr-like threaded view, I would be so happy.
I have the same problem you do. It's very difficult to find a community similar in scale or content to the stuff I used to post on. I used to be able to pop into a community and learn just by listening to people far smarter and more experienced than I.
You should try Matrix and XMPP chats. It's the closest thing I've experienced.
I used to be on specific Reddit threads, but the toxicity started to leak into even them, so I started to go into them less and less, until one day I stopped; when I realized I didn't like how I felt when I went on.
HackerNews is about the last one I have.
These days I actually mostly hang out on Facebook Groups discussing interests like photography and music.
I also hang out on tech slack servers and have many Discord servers open. The problem I see with Discord is I join many servers that I never return to but sometimes don't leave due to FOMO :).
I don't hang out there but you could check indiehackers.com?
Does anyone know what I'm talking about? It's been in the back of my mind for almost 20 years.
The only reason why I keep a FB account tbh.
(You can DM me on Discord for an invite if interested: JitterTed#4770)
I don't have as good of a casual non work related hangout place though. Just Twitter generally.
Eager to be a part of expanding the Chicago tech scene!
This link is no longer active To join this workspace, you’ll need to ask the person who originally invited you for a new link.
Surprisingly low honestly.
Expires in three days.
The Missoula tech slack has a welcome/intro channel which I encourage you to use.
You can make rooms but they get the name of the user, so I guess you need to create a user with the name of the topic you're interested in! Xo
I think pseudonymity is important so you know that one name is the same person the next time.
Creates persistence in every meaning of the word!
They say "do things that don't scale": well I'm trying son, I'm trying!
You will find a mix of knowledgable on a very wide variety of topics discussing current events. Many techies, but also doctors, lawyers, engineers, professors, etc.
There are newbie questions but there are also plenty of advanced convo too.
Also out of curiosity what it means to grow a community. I've started with a subreddit called r/StylizedArt
We just about hit 1000 people. Eventually I might add discord. Its been interesting so far.
How every "niche" server is organized:
#memes
#politics
#vidya
#off-topic
#news
#the-actual-topic