Ask HN: What sources like HN do you consume? I appreciate HN for staying up-to-date with technical news. For my side hustle I have to ramp-up on other areas like marketing, legal, sales, ... So I wonder if there are similar high-quality sources like HN for these areas. |
Other industries just don't have an HN equivalent, either for lack of trying or because hackers are good making and using things like HN when others aren't.
I built a HN clone for someone who wanted it focused on just E-Commerce discussions, but it failed to take off. Also didn't help that the person wanted to monetize it using a pay-to-use model. It never took off.
But it's impossible without their equivalent of @dang managing their equivalent of a forum of smart people who have a deep allergy to being marketed to/advertised at/BS'd or enshitified at. They need a HN-like immune system, often grossly overzealous and way too self-serious, that actively polices things like this.
That's why there's no HN equivalent elsewhere.
If you're interested in programming then r/programming
If UFC, for example, then
r/ufc
r/mma
r/python
Just whatever it is you're interested in, there's likely a subreddit for it. The more niche it is, the better the quality of the sub.
The Fediverse (specifically Lemmy and PieFed) have much higher signal to noise ratios and are frequented by the same folks you see here in a lot of cases. Additionally, their APIs are open and free.
OSINT blogs and resources like indicator news, Bellingcat 404 Media Individual Blogs like michaflee.com, Zach wittackers "This week in security" Courtwatch.news Privacy related forums like privacyguides.org Academic sources like Workshop on Privacy in Electronic Society, etc etc.
I'll spin up an n8n instance at some point to sift through everything I find.
Right now is basically a repository of philosophy-related links I find interesting, but it would be awesome to find a way to start generating philosophical discussions of the quality I find in HN for tech/AI
In the meantime I've bookmarked quite a few more on literature, politics, and such, if it's of any interest. I've also made (a fairly weak) case for Jacobin here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44309069
Dev.to and Zenn for longer-form technical writing, though the quality varies a lot.
For architecture and system design specifically, the Software Architecture subreddit (r/softwarearchitecture) has surprisingly good discussions.
HN remains the best for the intersection of tech + business + ideas.
Or use this, rebrand it; but I don't know if people in other fields would be turned off by the aesthetic and simplicity (?)
I remember seeing some green themed website that used Arc as a forum but I completely forgot what it was. Pretty active as well.
But other programmers who see this content immediately realize that it was generated and stop reading it.
Outside of tech, there are plenty of thoughtful communities of practice, tended by community leaders no less wise and dedicated than dang.
What HN has is YC. Its the financial estuary -- you come here to make contacts, not friends, and you come here to rub shoulders with people doing the work. And maybe, just maybe, have your own work recognized.
You can get those for much cheaper in e.g. a field like medicine, because promotion tends to happen on the basis of long-term deliverables delivered, rather than vibes about potential hyper scale returns a few years down the road. Simply, professionals are constructed as less desperate/opportunistic in other disciplines.
Other fields, like for example those that abut the artworld, are massively and aerobically served by a wide range of venues. Opportunity and curiosity are evenly distributed among them.
But that's not how our game works. Reputational opportunity is the gravity here, and we are all to some degree opportunists here, of varying degrees of success.
It's centralization. Our secret sauce is centralization.
This is both good and bad.
Their communities of practice tend to enshitify after just a handful of years, turn into professional flame wars on the same old topics, or otherwise ossify into something that just repeats the talking points of the day.
I've been in a number of these communities: you leave for 5 years and come back and it's the same discussions repeated forever, or news posted that's weeks or months out of date. They don't generate, they regurgitate, and slowly.
Some of Discord's largest servers are for AI tools, as it seemed like the logical choice when they were getting going. A couple years earlier I'm sure it would have been reddit.