Where would you go if HN becomes bad?

11 points by orangeyjuicey 4 years ago | 14 comments

Right now, HN is my favorite source of new information and I really like it.

But I think places like these can have a tendency to become bad, which might happen too far into the future for the alternative to already exist, but given that I feel it's taken a long time in my life to find this website, I wouldn't mind having a list somewhere of websites to try if I ever feel like this one isn't fun anymore.

So the question is, if HN was suddenly down, where do you think we would all go? (and maybe, where do you think we should go?)

methusala8 4 years ago |

Twitter is useful if one is able to avoid toxic conversations.

My policy is to mute certain words/people which trigger hostile exchange. With this mechanism in place, I have been able to follow a few interesting voices.

throwAwayFr 4 years ago |

Implying HN isn't already bad?

joshxyz 4 years ago | |

its still good (as someone who found this site just couple years ago) but every once in a while someone links an old thread, you're partially right.

uyt 4 years ago | | |

It's just selection bias. If those threads weren't great they wouldn't be linked. A better test would be to use wayback machine to look at a random date's front page and its threads.

thinkingemote 4 years ago |

I would go back to real world meetups. Remember Linux user groups?

simonblack 4 years ago |

I keep looking at 'Lobsters'. However it's a bit more 'tech' than HN.

the_only_law 4 years ago | |

It’s also invite only.

I used to roll my eyes at some of the things I saw on there, such as suggestions to freeze invites or to cull users, allegedly to keep the site high quality) but frankly I’m now wondering if those are the only sort of methods to achieve that.

joshxyz 4 years ago |

> So the question is, if HN was suddenly down, where do you think we would all go? (and maybe, where do you think we should go?)

nowhere lol lets be honest, but if its consistently down you can expect peeps here tweeting about it, haha.

global sites offline? check hn.

hn offline? check twitter.

lol

xet7 4 years ago |

For me, I'm happily at paywalled https://lunduke.locals.com of https://lunduke.com . Paywall keeps trolls away.

At HN/Reddit/Slashdot, there is flagging/downvoting etc, so it's hard to discuss something, like even asking about some normal technical question. It's possble to see something at HN new page, that will soon be flagged, disappear, downvoted etc. I would like to add comment to some flagged HN article, because for me it's important topic, but it's not possible because it's flagged.

tmaly 4 years ago |

I would fall back to usenet

mattowen_uk 4 years ago | |

Some of the comp.* groups are starting to get proper activity now that the spammers have all left.

forcry 4 years ago |

> Right now, HN is my favorite source of new information and I really like it.

I know this is not what you asked, but find a library. Nothing that is online is trustworthy anymore.