So far I've only replaced my motorsport subs (mostly F1) with Autosport Forums, a bona-fide old-school and vibrant community to this day.
Years ago I enjoyed the discussion on bluelight.org - happy to know it's still going strong.
What's missing in my life is a forum for movies, TV shows and one for video game discussion. Any suggestion?
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My issue with Reddit is I started using it in my 20s and now 15 years later, the average age is still 20. The quality of discussion is on the floor, though some love to mention subs like /r/askhistorians which are an exception among a sea of memes, one line puns and terrible moderation.
I recently purged most of my subreddit subscriptions and really focused in on topics I care about that still have content I actually want to see. I probably dropped 90% of my subscriptions.
The payoff is that as long as I never visit “all” I get a fairly well curated list of posts that don’t suck.
I rarely find myself sucked into rabbit holes like I did back when I first joined about a decade ago
So, basically, with reddit it's very much luck. I still use r/analog and r/londoncycling, but most of the other ones I accept are just meme subs.
Forums are great if you can find a good one for your purpose.
I use https://www.lfgss.com/ for cycling in and around london.
I also follow https://www.moneysavingexpert.com/ for money tips in the UK.
Controversial, but I think forums are better than subreddits, as there is less chance that you will get an influx of people who are not really interested in your stuff. If something hits r/all, you might get a lot of people controbuting to your sub that probably shouldn't be.
Finally, 4chan isn't half bad on some boards... /mu/ is kinda fun, as is /fit/
EDIT: to add another recommendation: https://bogleheads.org/forum/index.php - Personal investments, financial independence
Avoid large spaces.
Books. (It's a somewhat one-sided discourse, but not entirely so.)
If in need of specific expertise, seek it out. Much will be written down, some isn't. Many authors will respond to a well-considered emailed question.
Conversation scales poorly. It's easily disrupted. Intimacy is the opposite of scale.
What kind of discourse are you looking to have? Shooting the breeze? Discussing fads? Feeding curiosity? Building or understanding something?
Those are all distinctly different.
Oh, and I think I used to be a member on IlXor [3] in around 2004. Loved their UI (I think it is still the same); and hey, one can always assume that a no-bullshit UI is possibly a good indicator of no-bullshit discussions, just like on HN.
Oh, and Perlmonks and its Meditations section [4] -- I suppose I like a mixture of madness and intellectual depth. And Lambda The Ultimate [5], which is extremely dense IMO. I could skim those old PLT discussions for hours.
Are there any members of The WELL [6] on HN?
1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23262581
2: https://forums.somethingawful.com/
Have you considered starting your own Slack, invite interesting people and build a new oasis? (Or Matrix channel.) It would take some work to get people to join, but it’s not impossible.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
HN is mostly technical banter and sharing techne[1]. Tildes has a similar technological bent.