Ask HN: Tell me about some good niche online communities you know? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Tell me about some good niche online communities you know?

23 pointsanujkk18 comments

Everyone knows about facebook, google+, twitter and other popular social networking sites/communities that are general purpose(for all audience). I wish to know which niche communities(like HN) you like the most and why?

Edit : I'm also especially interested in communities that are women oriented.

View on HN

I'm not part of either of these, but http://ravelry.com is a famous knitting community. Another one which is really impressive is http://www.airliners.net. The photos and in-depth reviews people post on that site are just mind blowing.

Meatball wiki is crucial reading for people wanting to learn about online communities.

(http://meatballwiki.org/wiki/)

http://www.digitalweddingforum.com is my favorite forum for professional wedding & portrait photographers. I'm a member and an advertiser. It's a pretty great resource if you want no-nonsense business/technical photography info.

Membership is in the thousands and it's a paid forum, so it's profitable.

I don't know the actual numbers, but portrait and wedding photography has become very popular with women in the past few years. There are a lot of women that participate (possibly a majority).

There is also a women/mom photography forum called http://www.clickinmoms.com that is fairly popular, but I have no first-hand knowledge of it.

http://webhostingtalk.com is a pretty huge forum for everything hosting (vps, cloud, dedicated, colo..) related. Used to participate pretty heavy. It's actually a really good hacker resource.

http://www.bobpitch.com

People who just enjoy chatting about various subjects all day long.

I prefer http://www.popbitch.com ;)

There was a schism and some people created it as a spin off.

Similar sense of humour, but no interest in celebrities.

Programming languages: http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/

http://Everything2.com is a great community of writers; kind of an alternate reality, perspective-based wikipedia with a mix of fact, fiction, essays, drivel, and close-nit culture of folks who regularly meet up together.

Cinema 5D http://www.cinema5d.com/index.php Now including discussion about large sensor video cameras, but started very niche for those of us interested in shooting video on DSLRs.

Not specifically for women but Elite Trader (http://www.elitetrader.com/) is pretty niche.

Food bloggers seem to have a lot of online (and offline) meetups.

some obvious ones:

* web developers - http://forrst.com

* web designers - http://dribbble.com

http://www.ign.com/ - not sure if it counts as 'community' - but is very popular and was sold for something around $600m I think.

http://www.justbreastimplants.com/forum/ is self-explicatory, fairly busy and has a female audience.

I setup http://www.saasaholics.com for SaaS and Startup founders to help each other out

In the UK, there's http://mumsnet.com Obviously it's a mother's online community.

There is also essentialbaby.com.au that is an Australian new mom site that was purchase by fairfax for around $4m

rateyourmusic.com

Every music nerds wet dream.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com