Ask HN: What intelligent forums exist outside of HN? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What intelligent forums exist outside of HN?

50 pointsskylerwiernik48 comments

Twitter has long been declining, and Reddit has recently seemed to get much worse for me. Blind is just for bragging about your salary and making insensitive comments about race and sex.

HN is great, but I’m interested in more than just tech and tech people. Any recommendations?

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Mastodon works for me, but you do have to work to build your network.

Discoverability is a problem, but you follow people on your home server, follow the people they boost, see who they follow and follow them ...

Then cull ruthlessly.

Repeat a few times and quite quickly you find your personal feed full of things from interesting people.

If you don't have "algorithms" to suggest things to you, you need to do the work for yourself. Thing is, it takes some effort.

That's another thing. Most of the people active on Mastodon have done, or are doing, that work, which is a positive filter.

I recommend following hashtags to bootstrap your feed.

Seconded!

I forgot to mention that ... thanks. The ability to follow hashtags is excellent.

Also, starter packs, they're community curated lists of people to follow for specific niches.

I've had a similar experience with Bluesky, though it's much more like Twitter than Hacker News. You can curate a good feed by following a ton of people, then unfollow the noisy ones as you look over the feed. You can use "starter packs" and hashtags to help get started, too.

Once you've found some people you like, this tool is somewhat helpful for finding more people you might like to follow:

https://bsky-follow-finder.theo.io/

I totally get why so many peple are jumping to BlueSky, and I may yet, one day, join them. But I'm still almost exclusively on Mathstodon.xyz, only visiting a few places to stay in touch with a few people who are refusing to move (sometimes for perfectly valid reasons).

Having said that, I invite you to read this essay:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/02/ulysses-pact/#tie-yoursel...

I found that it expressed eloquently reservations of my own that I had been unable to put into words.

* https://wilwheaton.net/2024/11/nothing-but-bluesky-is-such-a...

For people who build connections and create content, I advise most strongly that they prepare from day one for having to move. Create your content elsewhere and then copy it to BS, keep a separate record of people you want to stay in touch with. Do not rely on a platform like BS for keeping anything.

The article exactly captures why I am using Mastodon-the-Platform and not BS. If I do put things on BS, I will be prepared to lose them, and connections.

But each person has their own reasons for using any of these platforms. I'm getting great technical content, mathematical content, connections, and conversations on Mathstodon.

PS: For the avoidance of doubt: mathstodon.xyz (carefully note the spelling) is one instance of Mastodon-the-Platform.

PPS: Again, I totally get why people are choosing other platforms, and this is not a criticism. It purely an explanation of my reasoning.

Which is why I never understand all the backlash on Twitter's feed.

Basically you have to curate your own feed. The platform should provide me with tools and features to do that effectively. Instead they keep trying to improve the algorithm.

I know you're probably looking for English language websites, but if you just want the satisfaction of knowing that forums are still "a thing":

This is a Dutch forum for Dairy Farmers. It's at the root of a lot of innovations: https://www.prikkebord.nl

This is a Dutch forum for tractor enthusiasts. The people there are very helpful and you can basically restore a tractor as a newbie with their help: https://www.tractorfan.nl

Even though these seem like very specific niches, both websites have tens of thousands of daily visitors.

In Sweden we have a great and pretty vibrant forum for runners: https://jogg.se

https://bogleheads.org/index.php has given me a good amount of joy as well as https://forum.mrmoneymustache.com/

"All the things personal finance" basically

Absolutely agreed. Bogleheads is an absolute treasure of discussion and I've gotten some excellent tax planning advice there. It's one of the few sites in my reading rotation with HN.

MMM's forum is also a classic. I don't read it regularly these days, but it definitely gets a read once every month or so. Still surprisingly active and I've found some really good lifestyle financial advice there, as opposed to the more number based info I get from Bogleheads. I just enjoy the idea of a forum filled with Mustachian ideology.

Some other:

Ask HN: Sites like HN on other topics?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37611708

Ask HN: What are some communities like HN?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37616919

https://www.lesswrong.com/

Forums are weird now since fb etc took over. You can find information in the strangest places. For instance I frequent UKClimbing forums and you could probably find information on how to fix your car, investments and data science. It's more about the community and moderation which is what makes HN continue to be valuable.

>HN is great, but I’m interested in more than just tech and tech people. Any recommendations?

No recommendations. But can you articulate what you might be looking for? ( certainly not easy to answer f you have not spend time thinking)

I can’t speak for OP, but I have the exact same question as they do. I don’t really care what the topic is, I just want to explore pages that have strong, intelligent communities who post insightful comments with an absolute modicum of true flaming/trolling.

I realize this doesn’t help you, but maybe it helps you understand why the request may have been vague?

One of my favorites: https://forums.servethehome.com

https://www.homebuiltairplanes.com/forums/

I lurk on a lot of boating and woodworking and fermentation forums.

YMMV.

Care to share a link to the fermentation forum?

I would be interested in that as well! I've been kind of obsessed with fermentation for a couple of years now, but it's all based on research driven by my own interests (I learn best when I immerse myself in a subject, in Dutch we call this "autodidact"). It would be nice to read along with what others are doing!

If anyone can recommend design or UX specific forums similar to HN, I would love to know. I miss Designer News.

Have you tried https://tildes.net

https://lobste.rs/

lobsters usually have pretty much the same content as hacker news, honestly.

i don't see much difference versus here

There’s some overlap in the articles, but quite different vibes IMHO. HN: Broader range of subjects, more non-tech stories (those are in general not allowed on Lobsters). Lobsters: Less comments overall, more narrow focus than HN. IMHO, they complement each other quite well.

lemmy dot world is similar to the other big forum you mentioned.

I've tried many but most don't have enough interesting traffic to keep you coming back.

bsky dot app is taking up more of my time, one of my tech interests, kicad, posts there a lot.

Just curious, is there any Russian forum that discusses software reverse engineering seriously? Now armed with AI it shouldn't be too hard to read the posts or even participate the discussions, and I know Russians are very good reverse engineers.

Or any Eastern European language programming forums. In general I believe they are excellent software engineers.

I think https://habr.com/ru/articles/top/monthly/ is the most famous

There's a similar one about russian "startups" https://vc.ru/popular/month

Thanks, will definitely take a look!

NOSTR!

> Twitter has long been declining

Why do you think so?

Isn't it obvious? The news feed is full of spam from people I do not know and do not follow. Meanwhile the posts of people I follow never reach me!

I remember twitter being like this in 2020 when I stopped using it.

That can certainly be true, too. But different people will have different thresholds for how much enshitification is too much. So, you hit your threshold in 2020 and OP hit there's today.

Yikes. Replying because I noticed my egregious typo: "theirs", not "there's".

This is Facebook's death spiral. People came to Facebook for their friends. Then FB inserted ragebait and ads in the pursuit of engagement metrics and monetization.

But then eventually Facebook is just a stream of ads and slop with no activity from friends.. And then you wonder why you're even there.

Twitter is clearly executing the same playbook.

Always has been. People on here just act like it's new because opinions they don't like don't get shadow banned anymore.

It is new. Elon has intentionally redesigned Twitter to surface right-wing and extremist opinions, which no longer get banned, in order to purge the "woke mind-virus", and the platform is flooded with bots.

Claiming that the platform is exactly the same as it's always been and then pointing out one substantial change from the way it's always been, is an insane degree of cognitive dissonance.

It might be more of a case of "if you're accustomed to left-wing bias, a balanced media feels like right-wing bias..."

The quote you're appropriating, "When you're accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression” doesn't really apply in this context because we're talking about actual right-wing content, which many people find offensive on its own merits.

And many people find actual left-wing content offensive "on it's merits".

Not sure what point you are making?

You're likely going to refuse to understand the point I'm making, but to anyone reading this thread in good faith it should be obvious. It is simply incorrect to claim that extremist right-wing content on Twitter is a counterbalance to some equal and opposite amount of extremist left-wing content, because said extremist left-wing content has never existed in the same quantities, nor to the same degree, as extremist right-wing content does now. Despite the narrative, there never was a "woke mind virus" on Twitter. No, the "Twitter Files" didn't really prove anything of the sort. Even before Musk, Twitter's algorithms tended to prefer conservative content because that drove engagement. After Musk, that has been dialed up to 11.

And the "left-wing content" some people find offensive is anything as banal as the mere existence of non-white characters in media, or the use of pronouns, or any number of entirely minor triggers most people don't care about. This simply isn't in the "same but opposite" category as open racism, misogyny and hate speech to most people, when simply not being a nazi counts as "left-wing" in modern parlance.

I think what you've said in your comment exists for the most part inside your head. You create these caricatures in your own mind in order rationalise the fact that you are, in fact, what you accuse others, a basic hater unable to accept the fact that people can disagree with you (and also the concept of freedom of speech in general).

>intentionally redesigned Twitter to surface right-wing and extremist opinions

"Surface"? At least we agree on the censoring because before it was only left-wing extremism.

The most interesting and intelligent people have left.

It does its best to divert your attention from your following feed.

Ads. Sidebars. Political rants. Threadbois. Engagement bait.

No more APIs. Can’t easily export your data. Your likes. Your bookmarks.

It’s overridden with engagement bots that perform post, reply, and follow campaigns. AI posters and commenters.

And not the worst: but it’s likely nobody will read your posts, even if you have Premium, unless you game the algorithm and boost your standings. This requires you to act like an influencer.

Fair question, if you live under a rock (and don't talk with anyone who reads U.S. national news, or the only people you talk with think Twitter is great!), so I upvoted. I don't know seventh12's motivations or current understanding, and while they could be trolling, why assume that? I suppose I could read their other posts, but I didn't. I'm mostly reacting to the downvotes, which I feel are unfair against a plain, if not tone-deaf, question.

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