Ask HN: Other communities like HN? I am always impressed by the quality and depth of the commentary on HN. After having read the articles posted, I gain a lot of value by having my perspective challenged many times over in the comments. As HN is focused on tech only, do you guys know of similar communities (quality of commentary/discussion) around the web that focuses on other niches? |
I'll occasionally read /r/mechanicalkeyboards and other communities I enjoyed, but as a whole, I find most of the site has turned into an echo chamber.
I tried voat for a while, but that pretty much degraded into a cesspool of racism.
https://www.reddit.com/u/akkartik/m/thehumancondition
(I got the name of the second multireddit from http://hubski.com/tag/thehumancondition. Hubski is another interesting community.)
I think the beauty of Reddit is that it's all up to you to curate the content, which obviously makes it hard to recommend things to read for others :P
Here is a list of my favorite subreddits for anyone who wants an idea of what's available on Reddit:
Tech-related:
- https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/
- https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/
- https://www.reddit.com/r/androiddev/
- https://www.reddit.com/r/netsec/
- https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/ (programming jokes)
- https://www.reddit.com/r/ReverseEngineering/
- https://www.reddit.com/r/emulation/ (video game emulation news and discussion)
- https://www.reddit.com/r/electronics/
Non-tech:
- https://www.reddit.com/r/AskAcademia/
- https://www.reddit.com/r/DepthHub/ (a better version of /r/BestOf)
- https://www.reddit.com/r/financialindependence/
- https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/
- https://www.reddit.com/r/sciencefiction/
- https://www.reddit.com/r/shittyaskscience/ (the opposite of AskScience)
- https://www.reddit.com/r/VXJunkies/ (try to figure this one out :P)
- https://www.reddit.com/r/bertstrips/ (beware: offensive content)
/r/netsec is nice and serious and nerdy
"Less Wrong is a community blog devoted to refining the art of human rationality."
Chips&Dips, er Slashdot, was the original high-quality tech forum on the internet. In recent years it has gone to trash, but it is still the model community-driven tech news forum and occasionally has very good commentary.
Slashdot's a classic, but I don't think I can really recommend it as "another community like HN". Maybe I could've, some years ago.
That links to the forums where you see some good discussion. Also the reviews of beer on the site are quite extensive.
Small example here: http://beerstreetjournal.com/tweet-from-beer-advocate-founde...
Nonforum.com is for sustainable / resilient agriculture+composting+earthships, alternative lifestyles, personal experiences, and forward-minded things that would otherwise not really have a home on the 'net.
There's a small write-up of things we are trying to foster at https://nonforum.com/about.html (or just click on the (non) logo card on the front page)
Still pretty nascent, and I haven't submitted a show HN yet because there's no commenting functionality up yet. On the bright side, nonforum functions as a nice link-sharing platform, and votes and submissions show up in real-time (no page refresh required).
Currently in semi-open beta (one needs an account to submit new links/write-ups and to vote on things), you can request an invite code by providing your e-mail, or, at the moment just asking me to send you one.
Not much content on there, but the content thats there is nothing I have seen anywhere else
It's still not very big but seems to be growing. And it's completely bereft of political talk, which I find refreshing.
It's still good for some culture stuff though.
HN is probably better on politics because there is real diversity of opinion.
Uh.. it's a little lean to left and then there are random hard right comments though. To be perfectly honest, I think the hard right see anything that isn't hard right is left tbh, that include moderates. And the demographic for HN especially programmers are liberal iirc. There were articles on how big tech companies employee voted and also the fact that silicon valley is situated in the most liberal of California.
The threads that have some sort of discord seems to disappear in an hour. Like the recent basic income one. Politics are kept to a minimum or hardly any at all.
Still want to build out cronofy.com integration to help members connect/meetup in person.
For tech, https://lobste.rs is decent. There's more interest in papers and proofs-of-concept than here. (Give a link to your profile on Twitter/GitHub/here in #lobsters on Freenode and someone will give an invite pretty quickly.)
For bootstrapped entrepreneurship, https://barnacl.es (my site) is small but welcoming and growing. (No invite needed.)
There are some exceptions, and technical subs are generally better than more mainstream ones.