Ask HN: Other online communities like HN? Interested in knowing if vibrant online communities exist where people talk shop similar to HN for other industries, e.g. construction workers, teachers, actuaries, doctors, etc. |
Ask HN: Other online communities like HN? Interested in knowing if vibrant online communities exist where people talk shop similar to HN for other industries, e.g. construction workers, teachers, actuaries, doctors, etc. |
https://www.journalduhacker.net/ - French Hacker News
https://write.narwhal.space/ - Writing
https://g33kz.de/ - German Hacker News
https://paperkast.com/ - Academic Papers
https://bitmia.com/ - Finance/Investing
All of the above are based on https://lobste.rs/, which is pretty much like HN with a few extra features and less Off-Topic
Also, there are independent StackExchange-like sites for physics and bioinformatics
I think it would be more useful to share sites that have great communities, even if they use different software.
For example, for investing, the Boggleheads forum is excellent: https://www.bogleheads.org/forum/index.php
The goal is to be a high-signal community to share and discuss research, design, and code of blockchain and cryptocurrency protocols.
It's invite-only (to keep the quality of links and discussion high), but we're just getting started, so definitely apply for an invite if this is a space you're interested in.
It could also be described as the birthplace of WhatsApp, in which one of the co-founders asked for 'thoughts on my free iphone app'[0], which is amusing in retrospect.
[https://www.flyertalk.com/forum/travel-technology/952359-tho...]
Construction workers - https://www.reddit.com/r/Construction/ "A subreddit for construction industry professionals."
Teachers - https://www.reddit.com/r/Teachers/ "The goal of r/Teachers is to provide a supportive community for teachers and to inform and engage in discourse with educational stakeholders about the teaching profession."
Actuaries - https://www.reddit.com/r/actuary/ "Articles and links of interest to those in the actuarial profession."
Doctors - https://www.reddit.com/r/doctors/ "This is a community for clinicians."
Etc.
Insightful comments, amazing (!) moderation system.
It all went downhill years ago though and now the quality of the discussions is horrendous.
is one of the Slashdot breakoffs from when they went too far. They are using an old fork of the Slashdot engine.
Very high quality.
Definitely a right-wing slant, but there are ton of very knowledgeable people there. Signal/noise ratio is kinda middle of the road, but the quality of the signal more than makes up for it in my opinion.
bogleheads is great if you're into personal finance of all sorts
airliners.net is great if you're into airline operations; PPRuNe.org too
For example, all moderator action is public. You have to give a reason to downvote comments or flag stories, and other mods as well as the user in question can see those in the case of comments, everybody can see them in the case of stories. If a user is banned, the reason for the ban will always remain visible. It has a tagging system for stories, every user can customize what tags they want to see. People can apply for "hats", which means being officially authorized to speak for a website, a project, an organization or company.
Pretty awsome, if you ask me.
HN has a clear vision and set of rules, Slashdot didn't. News for nerds, Stuff that matters.
Slashdot did have a moderation system where, if you were over a certain number of points (like HN) (and later hidden on /.) you could moderate. Moderation was a bit more complex sometimes leading to fun results with comments '+5 Offtopic' and '-1 Insightful'. There was playfulness. There was also meta-moderation where consensus was sought for previous moderation decisions. I don't think an learning 3rd stage algorithm would have helped, going back to the above: there wasn't a clear set of principles and very strong enforcement of that either by community of mods. And there was a very strong trolling community that were happy to live at -1, some of whom were Anonymous Cowards but have in some cases come to light as smart leading figures in their technologies.
Cmdrtaco and crew were ridiculed (sometimes very unfairly) but didn't react consistently. I don't think Dang and co wouldn't be bullied by a community site they shepherd.
tl;dr There was a special time in the internet, and some parts of the internet have learnt from this. And before this, there was another special time. And before that another. And we will look back too.