dpreview: Photography discussions. A lot of specialised sub-forums.
slickdeals: Yes, it is a deals site, but there is a bit of a community there I guess (a lot of discussion, but it is very consumerist as you'd imagine).
Stackoverflow: I've given up posting/asking questions. The community is pretty hostile and what was once the very best place to ask questions on the internet now thinks it is Wikipedia and downvotes almost every question that gets asked (even if nobody can answer, and even if there is no linked dupes). It now seems like a badge of honour on that site to mark something as "dup" but often they link to questions which are absolutely nothing like the original. The community is mostly toxic.
An online community focused on quality, thought-provoking conversations about a broad range of interests. It's a significantly different experience from other online communities:
-Most members choose to use their real identities on the site, and this information is only available to other members.
-Each member pays a small subscription fee, which helps keep out trolls and spammers. The fee also pays for moderators and serves as our members' commitment to quality and respect.
-Discoverboard doesn't display ads to subscribers or sell their data.
Full disclosure: I work for discoverboard. We would be very interested in hearing your thoughts about it. I also just created an invite code for free trials for people on this thread: https://discoverboard.com/code/HN
- Using your real identity is an extremely bad idea. Write something stupid once and it will haunt you forever. People will speak their mind only when protected by anonymity.
- The topics and replies seem pretentious. Most likely because of the real identity thing. Everybody just tries to sound smart, eloquent and philosophical.
- Unless you have some truly smart people initiating ideas and discussions, it's just the topic of the day kind of thing. It gets boring pretty fast.
This is suboptimal.