Ask HN: Where to have good discussions online? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Where to have good discussions online?

43 pointserlich64 comments

I find that I have far more topics I would like to discuss, than people to discuss them with.

I will often have a thought or a question, but find it difficult to find the right venue to have a discussion about it.

Reddit always seems to have the best design for such discussions, but the moderation is frustrating. There are so many rules about who can post, and often subs are heavily biased and censored.

Quora often pops up for questions but its more a reference than a place for discussion.

Maybe some kind of search engine for forums.

View on HN

I miss forums. They were a better format for debate IMO.

HN is one of my favorite places on the internet - the themes, the people and the tone are really cool. But the ephemeral nature of posts is not good for discussing ideas. Threads for debating ideas in depth should last forever, as they did in forums.

I wish HN launched a forum feature, or that someone built something in parallel and they saw a massive influx from the HN community.

If someone has ideas on how to pull this off I’d be happy to contribute - I can design and code full-stack. My requirement to hop on board would be that we somehow manage to tie it to the HN values, themes and audience - I wouldn’t be so interested in an ex-novo community-building exercise.

Maybe we could start with some structured discovery work, gathering opinions from existing HN users - we know where to find them! - and take it from there.

HN is my go to also, but the reality is there are lots of intelligent yet stubborn people here that refuse to be wrong or take criticism. One of the best ways to learn about ourselves and the world is through knowing that we actually know very little

I agree with the sentiment, sometimes people in HN - myself included - are very hot-headed. Discussion is not always positive. It’s one of the reasons I’ve built a public profile - I found that sometimes I too get caught in negative dynamics, and want to experiment how being non-anon affects me.

As a rebuttal to your point though:

- All debate, from Socrates to this part, is bound to be heated and messy by nature.

- HN discussion is some of the very best I’ve experienced on the net. Like I said, the ethos, themes and people are great. Discussions ranging from OCaml, to startup financing, to befriending crows? Dope. The CEO of Stripe dropping in to comment? Dope.

- The permanence of a forum would mitigate some of the issues you point out (though not all - forums have never been impervious to mean or hot-headed users)

> All debate, from Socrates to this part, is bound to be heated and messy by nature.

Strongly disagree on that. In an academic environment, I regularly observe and participate in exacting debates that remain cool-headed and civil. Now, the ability to do this takes effort to develop, but incivility in debate is just a mark of laziness and immaturity.

I am not in academia so I cannot say, but I have observed plenty of controversy from the outside and have seen other commenters in HN express their disillusionment on academic debate.

Regardless I’m not proposing that HN or analogous platforms should be 4chan.

It’s good to aspire to orderly and rigorous debate, but I don’t think that hyper-regulation is good either. We humans are messy, and there’s good things about that, too. It’s a matter of degree.

Yeah HN can get testy too. Especially, in the recent past, when it comes to discussing management, RTO etc.

Its understandable to a degree. Most here are probably NOT the primary reason why management needs to be around but still it can often be like Reddit that way.

I have mulled over going public with my account because i agree with you, its easy to flame to just act a fool under the guise of anonymity when you generally know it may be hard to get to you in the real world, just how discussion doesnt devolve so quickly as often in public. BUT there are too many crazies out there that are more than willing to take a simple disagreement of opinion to crazy heights that I don't see the risk/rewards.

As I have gotten older though, I have gotten better about recognizing when someone is simply dug in or flaming, especially in the first reply or two and simply dis-engage. Not always, we all have our bad days, but I try to be better about it.

Also, i noticed your account is new, but im not sure if you are new here. But wanted to add this, as it can help facilitate discussion

http://www.hnreplies.com/

Otherwise known as “people”. And you’re one of them you just don’t realize it.

I think this is key for why forums were great. You have a single thread for a discussion topic / post, so anyone getting defensive, flaming, or trolling gets lost in the thread as people reply to highly quality posts in the thread.

Forums were great. I miss them greatly. Not only were they better for debate, but they fostered a sense of community. They were welcome to discussion and collaboration and experimentation. People could learn from each other and form lasting bonds. Everything on sites like Reddit is too ephemeral and anonymous.

Forums also let you choose the level of anonymity you wanted, and other people to choose the level of trust that they had in you. I think this feature came from the simplicity of having a purely chronological timeline of posts on a given topic.

Once you have Facebook-style mandates or recommendation algorithms and voting mechanisms (like Youtube and Reddit), that goes out the window. Now, people look for and find the "popular" perspective or the algorithmically-favored perspective instead. By removing the work from the process, they have turned off the critical thinking that was involved.

No idea

    My solution is to "meditate" on the ideas and write blog posts, so that I don't bore my friends with the topics, anyone can read the blog or contact me if they really want to.

Sorry to have to say it ..

But the only place for this right now are some niche forums and 4chan.

Reddit and quora rely on "reputation" and vote not in arguments.

So it is more like an echo chamber.

On 4chan there is no "names/nicknames" no "reputation" or points.

Your argument has to stand on its own and will be teared apart.

I think that's the main problem with 4chan, the whole ethos is built around being hostile under a veneer of 'brutal honesty.'

The immaturity of such behaviour wears thin quickly after the first few laughs, unless you like the company of a-holes (can't think of a better term).

We are in such times that telling the truth is *hostile*.

We have govt, companies, celebrities, teachers all so used to lying that when someone talks truth it "cracks" the social norm.

We even say that someone is "too naive" when they are honest about their opinions.

If you want to pursue real talk and truth you must be ready to some harsh exchanges.

No, and this is exactly the problem. There's a difference between telling the truth civilly and doing so as an a-hole. It's amazing people struggle so much to distinguish the two.

Can't say my experience matches that. I only ever really posted on the fitness board, /fit/, but it's honestly probably the most positive and evidence focused fitness community I've ever experienced.

BB.net is almost legendary for how brutally unwelcoming it is. The 10th planet forums see both a lot of hostility on the topic of practical combat and street fights, and has a huge contingent of borderline schizoid conspiracy theorists because papa Eddie never met a lizard man he didn't believe in. Reddit fitness and Instagram fitness seem to be primarily dedicated to the goal of self aggrandizement and self promotion, and they don't feel like a real place for conversation.

Twitter is still a good and viable alternative but probably you need to invest a good amount of time and energy to curate your timeline and your following list.

Also need to invest time and energy on twitter search (https://twitter.com/explore) with know-how on search operators (https://github.com/igorbrigadir/twitter-advanced-search) to find the right topics and people you want to have a conversation with.

I find that Twitter doesn’t scratch the itch that discussion boards do.

Having to invest time and energy in search is one reason and then also the threading and topic selection is all over the place. There’s no sense of community for me.

It also seems like a lifestyle choice where a large amount of time has to go into it. Whereas I used to be able to drop into slashdot or kuro5hin or plastic or netslaves or reddit and check in without having to be always on.

If you don’t mind discussing IRL, I have grown very fond of meetups. I host a JavaScript meetup and tried out different others (a startup meetup, one about DIY/Electronics). meetup.com is a great source for this. It also has the benefit that you will meet people that want to socialize and discuss topics. In the internet, I feel like people often feel obligated to discuss an opinion.

Formerly IRC, now Matrix, discord, slack etc, with a small community that actually likes each other is pretty good, but that's a shitty answer to the question, because invitation into these circles is almost always friend-of-a-friend.

The various rationalist spaces are at worst filled with pedantry, and at their best home to useful in depth discussions on very niche topics.

Some forums are good, but the majority seem to have a serious problem with the user base aging up and becoming very cliquish. I actually wish I knew why this clique behavior was so much more common on message boards than just about any other comms medium.

Reddit is mostly pretty bad, and as you mentioned seems to have poor moderation down to a near science. I actually think a lot of particularly bad mod practices and also common hostile mod-user interactions are driven by Reddit's global karma as a primary or secondary effect.

I still advocate for IRC. There are some really long running communities that are absolutely solid in my opinion. Maybe I'm just getting old but I find the discord structure and eco system to have too much chaos and trolls. Not all of course.

How do you find them?

The Libera irc network has a lot of active rooms with different topics.

Is there a way to discover new Libera chat channels beyond randomly joining different places?

On any IRC server you can list the channels created..

`/list` This will list all, but you can filter for min people for example in the channels

`/list -min 10`

The freenode irc is a good place to start : chat.freenode.net they have probably the largest set of general and some specific channels for discussions. Good mods, rules etc.

But over the years of being on IRC and growing list of communities and friends I have a few that I join for particular areas of interest but as for an all in one 'directory' I'm not too sure if one exists.

Depends what you mean by "have a discussion".

If what you really want is to re-examine controversial or contrarian positions (i.e. restart old flame wars), many places will not be very keen.

If you really want a platform to be heard, start a blog with a comments section and learn to promote it.

If what you want is a venue to test your logic against others who are similarly motivated... join an IRL debating club.

If you want to learn from experts, try YouTube channels and then go where they engage with their support base e.g. pay them on Patreon. Expert subreddits are good too if you are willing to play by the rules.

If you just want to shoot the breeze about casual topics, Twitter is still there.

(edit: formatting)

Stack Exchange sites depending on the topic (I'm just going to assume they generally don't have the toxicity of StackOverflow).

Also look around for smaller, more specific subreddits. As a general rule, the bigger the subreddit, the more moderated it will be.

Discord has been recommended. I'm backing it up. Same principle about moderation and size apply.

It wouldn't hurt to look at the comment section of a related blog post or even a YouTube video. The latter is scraping at the bottom of the barrel though.

I love stackexchange, but it is rather hostile to discussions. It is the best at asking questions, and getting them answered, but a discussion is cut short by the rules.

Many subreddits have Discord servers for more discussion. They may also be moderated but give you the opportunity to have more back and forth with people on the topic.

You just need to find smaller subreddits, obviously in the big ones anything going against official leftist/progressive opinion is banned, deleted or downvoted into oblivion (HN is only slightly better in this aspect, but I would say there are smaller subs which are more open minded than HN)

I wish there was no downvote feature here and you could flag anything publically only with publically stating reason for flag without abusing this feature anonymously.

Reddit has been the only place. Stack overflow and Quora push against any form of discussion. Super annoying.

Reddit pushes against any form of discussion. If you don't echo the sub's sacred tenets, the mods mute or ban you for "trolling" or "misinformation".

It doesn't even have to be a controversial or topic-based sub, and the comment doesn't even have to be a politically or socially-sensitive issue.

I'm not saying it's good, the other places outright ban discussions though.

My experience is also different than yours, I guess it's based on the subreddit

Eh, I see this complaint all the time. I've never actually seen it. Just avoid the subs with crappy mods and you'll be fine.

Well, depending on how you define "discussion". Nine times out of ten, when I see this complaint, it's because what they call "discussion" I'd call "trolling"...

For example in my hometown subreddit (~ 100k users) I got banned for 90 days for "trolling". I comment there roughly in the same tone that I comment here, so I couldn't tell what it was that had been marked trolling. I messaged the mods, and, as usual, got no reply.

I'm not in the least bit surprised about that. My understanding is that Nextdoor, which is a social media service for local communities, is also a drama-filled nightmare. I'd be shocked if equivalent Reddit communities didn't share those same issues. That has nothing to do with Reddit, per se, and more about how local community forums can be pretty damn toxic places, unfortunately.

I don't think Reddit is the answer. The culture there is… somewhat hostile. YMMV.

If I were looking for good discussion on a particular topic, I would present my arguments in a post on my blog and enable comments. I think Chris Coyier's CSS Tricks website is a good example of this. He can moderate, set the topic, and set the tone.

>Maybe some kind of search engine for forums

https://boardreader.com Have not used it in years but it used to be good.

The reason Reddit is so heavily moderated is so that it stays a good place for discussion. Those rules are often in place because of prior bad experiences.

That's an unreasonably optimistic take. In many subreddits, moderation is just for enforcing the moderators opinions.

I think that’s the surface purpose, but in practice it’s not a good place for discussion because of the heavy moderation.

I spend less time on Reddit and less time discussing because some subs ban or restrict based on seemingly arbitrary rules and they vary from sub to sub so unless you really dig into a sub’s rules you won’t know that you’re not allowed to “have your words cause harm” by criticizing an idea because that sub has a rule and bans.

I don’t think this is conducive to good discussion because it directly removes people with good intentions from the discussion and discourages speech that may trigger a mod to make an arbitrary ban.

The reason Reddit is so heavily moderated is because despite receiving more than $100 million in quarterly revenue, they refuse to pay full time moderators. And the only people willing to do that work for free are crazy, terminally online NEETs who want to push their political agendas.

Reddit and up until Musk also Twitter are heavily left leaning with all it comes with like progressive opinions over conservative etc., I don't think they are even hiding it

it's very difficult to have civil discussion on Reddit if you go against official Reddit hivemind, but yeah there are smaller subs where even conservatives/centrist/right can discuss

being unable to fight the zeitgeist isn't really a moderator issue, and it's an explicit feature of reddit, and also Hacker News.

The reality is that if your opinion, no matter what it is, is disliked enough to overcome the default positivity bias (upvotes exist in higher frequency than downvotes), you will be democratically silenced.

This often affects the framing and scaffolding of your comments more than the core content, and encourages a style of writing that inherently seeks mass appeal.

There's something about the average highly upvoted reddit comment that just feels like a reddit comment, to the point that you can even ask ChatGPT to generate a highly upvoted reddit comment about "X" and it does a pretty good job.

Can I ask those replying, which moderation rules would you choose, in general?

You don’t need a new search engine just Google Topic + forum or topic + Reddit. Smaller reddits are still ok.

YMMV

https://discussion.fool.com

Matrix chat is … interesting. Though beware, the crazy is infectious.

How does one use it? No obvious link to any chatroom

It's federated real time chat, similar to IRC, with a lot of additional embedded functionality, akin to slack/teams/discord. You can either go to the largest matrix host, matrix.org, or any other website with open registration and make an account and you should have access to join any open channel.

That said, in my experience, most of these communities are closed, but generally happy to invite people from one closed community to another.

IRC - Libera Networks

I find that IRC is chock full of people willing to misinterpret and nitpick ANYTHING about you say, no matter how uncontroversial it is.

Folks in Economics and Python channels seems reasonable.

If the same C folks are there, agreed.

I find that is generally true of everywhere online, most especially where people are incentivized by voting mechanisms such as Hacker News. IRC is real time dialogue where people are better able to defend themselves without concern for votes.

I find teamblind.com very civilized.

If you want good quality discussion on the Internet, my experience is that the best place to find it is behind a paywall. The WELL is a long-standing example; I used to be a member, before becoming excessively frustrated with some of the personalities. You couldn't fault the depth of the discussions however.

It depends on what you mean by "discussion". There are many actions people call "discussion" that end up being disruptive and toxic to the community housing that action.

What do you mean by moderating on Reddit being frustrating? Are you trying to argue counter to observable fact?

Maybe someone else can help me out here: there is a site somewhere (I can’t recall the name) that mirrors Reddit and keeps track of what content gets deleted. If you saw that, you would have to agree “counter to observable fact” is not an accurate description of things that are removed or censored. The moderation is incredibly politically and ideologically driven.

https://www.reveddit.com is probably the most popular

there is also

https://www.unddit.com

That’s it. Thanks!

The two points they bring up are the rules about who can post, and how things are heavily one-sided.

To the first point, there are automod rules setup to prevent brigading that end up preventing lurkers from making their first contribution. This may be what they've experienced.

To the second point, what are observable facts that are not arguable? Isn't the whole point of science that everything can and should be arguable as long as you follow the method?

I sense a political reply coming...

I enjoyed the self-reference here

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