Hacker News Reader

Comment by Xelbair | Hacker News Reader

Honestly looking for information about hobbies is horrible nowadays. It's all first and foremost subreddit, which has mostly memes and no info except maybe a sticky, THEN you find a discord link there, and finally all the knowledge is organized in google docs spreadsheet, that's in some random pinned post in some weirdly named channel.

I miss the days of the forum and wikis, it was vastly easier to search and lurk. and now you need a multiple accounts to even find that information.

View on HN

What sort of hobbies are you talking about specifically? Not to doubt you, but I must have very different hobbies because I've never experienced something like this

Have you ever used an old school forum? Threaded posts, which can be pinned. So much easier to navigate than the stream of discord comments. I admit, I am 50 now so maybe I'm just old and don't understand discord...

you can sorta do that with discord, with either pinned messages in threads or just a thread that contains the intro posts and that's closed for further comments, so you can easily find what you look for

This is a big problem in the origami community. The forums have died and have been replaced with discord, it's become pretty inaccessible so I imagine it's the same for other niche hobbies.

Hackaton in my city, geocaching, fucking origami. Hiking.

I do miss phpBB forum with the curated read only section, the lore of important post that all the forum has read and so on

fighting games for example.

it used to be that you could find a wiki with all the frame data, bnb combos and character specific tips/guidelines, and move analysis.

now it's spread on character specific discords, where data is in google docs.

Forums still exist. They may be less visible but they are still many of them around, especially for computer-adjacent hobbies.

I wonder if we could use LLMs to update wiki. "Hey bot, update the Wiki page for Mass Effect with the information in this thread."

Reply on news.ycombinator.com