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Ask HN: Alternatives to HN for non-Hacker News?

83 points by dash2 ↗ HN
I value Hacker News' polite, curious forum culture, which has lasted much longer than I would have expected. Are there other forums with similarly high standards, but which are focused on other things (science, maths, psychology, art... whatever?)

75 comments

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SubGenius
You might like this: https://gurlic.com

More about it in my comment history...

dfee
Nice to come across this again. Looks like you’re also attempting article creation with rich text editing on mobile. Are you currently using slate or draft?
SubGenius
Thanks! No it's a Svelte editor component based on Prosemirror. The editor is still a bit hairy around the edges, but working on getting it right. :)
sgdpk
I am also interested in this... I used to like Reddit a lot, but I feel their push to reach a broader audience has pushed down the quality of the front-page subs. It is dominated by a sense of moral superiority: "Am I the Asshole", "Justice Served", Leopards ate my Face" are very common now.

I like Quora because of specific authors that write high-quality answers (mainly mathematics).

michaelbuckbee
I've done some work to curate my sub-reddit list to just those that I care about and it's a pretty great experience. YMMV obviously but with some pretty minimal setup Reddit can be greatly improved.
sgdpk
I think you are right, I am complaining mostly about the "front page of the internet" part. I like visiting other subs, and I usually find answers to Google searches there, because some communities are really good.
Scott_Sanderson
Agree with the comments in this thread. I never browse /r/all anymore but have connected with some small niche communities on reddit that are great.

It is interesting how much the character of the site changed as it has become more popular.

dash2
Ironically I am a big fan of r/wallstreetbets, whose culture is... not quite the same as HN. (PSA: do not go to wallstreetbets.)
thiht
> I used to like Reddit a lot, but I feel their push to reach a broader audience has pushed down the quality of the front-page subs. It is dominated by a sense of moral superiority: "Am I the Asshole", "Justice Served", Leopards ate my Face" are very common now.

...don't subscribe to these subreddits then? Reddit allows to curate what you see, so do the curation. Viewing my frontpage when I'm logged in vs when I'm not is a completely different experience. It's a bit like viewing the Youtube trending videos.

simias
In my experience there's a reddit culture that's quite pervasive. As soon as a subreddit becomes even mildly successful it starts being taken over by low effort content and "downvote to disagree" mindset. Very strict moderation helps but that's a lot of work and few subreddits manage to pull it off.

Then there's the more general problem that Reddit clearly wants to encourage the "facebookization" of the website to drive adoption and ad revenue, and that's how you end up with an almost unusable web interface on mobile if you don't know that i.reddit.com is a thing. The desktop interface at least attempts to show you the posts, but it's still a buggy and laggy mess and you're much better off using old.reddit.com if you know about it.

I just can't be bothered to deal with all of that nonsense.

hue3
This works to a certain degree. Often, many of the users contributing in "bad subreddits" also post on "good subreddits". This makes it so that many aspects of "reddit culture" leak into the good subs, for example, the repetitive inside jokes and puns redditors seem to enjoy.
5h
Reddit before user-moderated subreddits was far more pleasant, not that they're exactly at fault but they widened the audience just like eternal september & signal:noise, or signal:bullshit, ratios never recovered. There are still 'good' subreddits but above a surprisingly tiny community size they degrade rapidly & irreversably. What shocks me the most is if you log out well over 1/2 the front page content is at schadenfreude, it's awful.
dash2
I think the logic of user-moderation is quite cunning though. It lets thousands of different moderators try what works. A strategy of throwing mud at the wall. So the frontpage stuff is pretty janky, but perhaps that's because the lowest common denominator always is. It's true that when a subreddit gets popular it faces new challenges, and many fail. But that might be true for any forum.
5h
The barrier to entry for brigading & group think is lower on reddit than discrete forums, I think that's part of the problem & I've no idea what the solution is. Different moderation methods have been tried all over (+5 insightful etc) but they have barely succeeded in isolation & I doubt they'd fare any better vs Reddits firehose.
konjin
>Reddit before user-moderated subreddits was far more pleasant

You mean before 2008? Because that's when you could create your own subreddits, and the system was promptly gamed by qgyh2 to make all of them.

5h
Yes, i lurked for a while but signed up in 2007
konjin
Rose tinted glasses are a thing: http://web.archive.org/web/20070508231740/http://reddit.com/
5h
They absolutely are, but I think that link demonstrates the difference I was poorly describing quite well actually, the front page was diverse then too - by design - but how many of those links are sharing things at someones expense in the r/trashy sense? Not to put the content of that link on some sort of pedistal, but how many of those links would make it to the frontpage today?

It's a differnet site today than then, but if it were current that type of content is still broadly more interesting to me than the present frontpage. Having a read of some of the comment threads too it's really quite different to today, Sure there were in-jokes but it was more than same tired memes getting voted to the top time after time.

Tomminn
Quora has become.. weird for me. I used to love the site, but now 80% of the answers that come up in my feed feel creepy as fuck.

It's a shame because it used to be of such high average quality.

I'm sure it's a classic case of my clicks at low agency moments driving the algorithm to deliver what low-agency-me wants, but I just wish it wasn't so keen to drive the trash towards me.

soneil
I think Quora bubbles a little too hard. I got stuck in a gun-rights bubble. I had to just walk away entirely.

So just FYI - if it seems really creepy, Quora might have just decided that's your thing, to the detriment of all else.

overkill28
If you follow thing-centric instead of people-centric subreddits and ignore the default ones you get a pretty good experience.
clashmeifyoucan
I used to love Quora but then it became absolutely terrible, so I started using Medium more. Then Medium went ahead and essentially made itself pay to play, so here we are.

I miss the times when both of those platforms were good.

gidan
Reading Reddit comments will feels like hell if you’re right winging. You described it pretty well, it’s all about displaying a strong sense of moral, which at the end is translated into a false sense of superiority. « Look at me, I am a good person! »
skybrian
On Reddit, some tightly-moderated forums with high standards are /r/AskHistorians and /r/econmonitor. I like hanging on on tildes.net which also has good moderation, but it doesn't have any particular specialty.
rjtavares
Thanks for the /r/econmonitor recommendation. /r/economics is the worst subreddit for a major discipline I've seen, on first glance that one seems to be of much higher quality.
kratom_sandwich
Well, there is (quotes taken from Wikipedia):

LessWrong [1] - a "community blog and forum focused on discussion of cognitive biases, philosophy, psychology, economics, rationality, and artificial intelligence, among other topics."

SlateStarCodex [2] - "a long-form blog written by a San Francisco Bay Area psychiatrist known by the partial pseudonym Scott Alexander. The blog is focused on science, medicine (especially within psychiatry), philosophy, politics, and futurism." ATTENTION: Currently on hiatus and only some of the content available.

Datatau [3] - made the round on HN some time ago as a "fork" of HN for data science topics. Discussion, however, seems to be non-existent.

[1] https://www.lesswrong.com/

[2] https://slatestarcodex.com/

[3] https://datatau.net/

fossuser
I’d second the first two as also great.

I’d add:

https://www.persuasion.community/

Which was a community started by Youscha Mounk.

https://www.persuasion.community/about

“ Persuasion is a publication and community for everyone who shares three basic convictions:

We seek to build a free society in which all individuals get to pursue a meaningful life irrespective of who they are.

We believe in the importance of the social practice of persuasion, and are determined to defend free speech and free inquiry against all its enemies.

We seek to persuade, rather than to mock or troll, those who disagree with us.

In the past years, the political and intellectual energy has been with illiberal movements. Too often, the advocates of free speech and free institutions have been passive, even fatalistic. It is high time for those of us who believe in these enduring ideals to stand up for our convictions.”

joe_the_user
Less Wrong is an interesting yet incredibly frustrating phenomena. It's fascinating mix of semi-solid speculation, dubious speculative and pernicious right-wing/"evolutionary" arguments (IE, shades from sold game theory to incel-thinking and such). I like to survey it sometimes but I also actually would like it to die since some of the more interesting thinkers/tendency might do better pulling out of it's particular (and very toxic imo) "rationality" framework.
moksha256
FYI I'm about 5 days away from launching Hystoria, a link aggregator limited to items >5 years old.

Idea is to beat hysteria with history. I contend that an unrelenting focus on "breaking" news and hot-takes is what is behind so much of the craziness in today's discourse. So I hope putting a constraint to block that stuff from discussions from the get-go may result in a kinder, more polite, more thoughtful, and intellectually curious kind of community like HN. Or not. It's an experiment.

More on launch post: https://100millionbooks.org/blog/news/introducing-hystoria/

There is no seed content yet and there's a broken link on the header. But feel free to sign up and post! I'm only posting this now because this thread seems highly relevant and it's HN so slightly broken/hacky stuff isn't so taboo :)

https://hystoria.100millionbooks.org/

jrockway
Very good idea! I tried signing up and got a "registration closed" error.
m52go
Shoot sorry, I had closed registration while developing. It's open now!
da_big_ghey
Ditto. I do, however, appreciate that it is not using recaptcha.
briefcomment
Nice, but I'm worried it'll be too high of a barrier for entry, as date is usually an afterthought in my experience. Seeking things that are explicitly old would be hard.
m52go
Let's see. Not everything interesting I come across on the web is a good fit for HN, but when I see something that is, I post it here.

I've found that (at least for me) once a community is strong enough, and my motivation to participate in it is strong enough, it's not hard to participate in it naturally.

dash2
Interesting. I'm often late to things myself, and think there is value in reviewing things in an "untimely" way. Like, how good is Breaking Bad if you start watching it in 2020?
m52go
I always wait to watch TV shows and movies until the hype has blown over and people can actually tell me their honest thoughts...often in relation to other shows they've seen.

Time allows for context that simply isn't possible otherwise.

It's become a huge time-saver for me. And I would say the shows I do end up watching tend to be of higher quality, on average!

politelemon
I apply a similar approach to games. It seems inescapable that every new release is already anticipated to be "goty" or "goat" by reviewers merely minutes after they've played it, to cater to high audience expectations.

An additional benefit of waiting, there's usually a sale on!

captain_price7
There is r/patientgamers for people like you in case you didn't already know.
019341097
My wife recently started watching it, and I’d argue that she’s enjoying it more today in 2020 than I did when I was watching it as the episodes were released.
giantg2
The longer I work at my job, the more I am tempted by or appreciate that story.
[deleted]
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cush
5 years? At the speed news is moving nowadays, 5 hour old news is too slow for most social media sites =P
m52go
That's the point! But yes the 5 year timeframe is somewhat arbitrary and may need to be adjusted.
bostonvaulter2
I'm unclear, are you trying to say that the above idea is poor?
oceliker
I'm sure you thought about this deeply already, but FWIW I think 5 years is a little bit too long. You're basically looking for "timeless" articles, but there are not that many of those on the web; much less so if you exclude the last 5 years. Also, this necessarily eliminates anything related to new scientific and technical advances, which I think are the coolest discussions in HN in general.
m52go
I will admit the 5 year timeframe is a bit arbitrary and may need to be adjusted.

With that said, the goal is positively not to replicate HN with discussions of cutting-edge technology and science.

Even in those topics, I think there's plenty to cover in those fields as it related to nostalgia, little-known but significant advancements, unsung heroes, etc.

konjin
I started a subreddit like that.

Shortly there after I made it private and only let myself have posting rights because I didn't feel like dealing with actual Nazis posting news about Jews ruling the world from the 30s, or hysterical liberals posting in every comment how everything that wasn't acceptable in 2018 SF was *ist.

Good luck, you're going to need it.

m52go
Yeah, I figure that's the curse of any community gaining traction. I expect to have to turn off comments at some point...if that fails I'll just restrict registrations.

In a worst-case scenario, I think the broader 100 Million Books project would still benefit from me and/or a couple of collaborators posting to it alone.

konjin
Since you'll own the platform, I did run a mailing list in the 00s that used to charge people $1 per email they sent out. It made the quality of the mailing list astronomical, but it died because it just couldn't scale with the payment systems in place then.

I have no idea what the integration of things like stripe are like today. I imagine it would be much better. Food for thought before you turn off comments.

m52go
Interesting, thanks. I actually looked into $1 payments for an adjacent project and the costs are still prohibitive even today. Stripe fees cost something like 30-40% for a $1 payment, and PayPal is only slightly better :/
konjin
Huh, that's better than what I was expecting.

I'll need to dig into the apis, but I don't see a reason why this can't work with those rules. I got hit with some ridiculous money laundering laws when I made more than $1k a month and needed to basically get an accounting colonoscopy or incorporate to continue which would have cost a lot more than I was making in a year.

therealdrag0
I’ve occasionally thought about writing a script to filter HN for just posts with a year in the title, like [2015]. These throwbacks usually are posted because they have some timeless value.
throwawaysea
On Reddit I would recommend r/ModeratePolitics or r/Centrist or r/NeutralPolitics or r/NeutralNews for more balanced, nuanced, and civil (non-hostile) discussions.
abanayev
At least a third of the items on HN are not hacker news, such as this on the front page now: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25317896
dash2
That's true, but HN as a whole does reflect hacker culture - even in the non-computer-ish things that they take an interest in. If you had a bunch of economists, for example, you'd get more economics and less programming, but also different history, different art.... Hmm, actually you'd probably get econjobrumors.
seph-reed
> HN as a whole does reflect hacker culture

I don't feel this even a little bit. It represents tech culture pretty decently, and there is a lot of overlap with hacker culture.

dash2
What's the difference?
seph-reed
Not much if you focus on exclusively white-hat hackers. It's really the black/grey hat hackers who's culture is sort of... marginalized? on HN.
oehtXRwMkIs
hopefully lemmy.ml will be like that in the future
mariusor
And also the other fediverse link aggregators.
floatingatoll
To put an interesting spin on this question for those considering it:

"What other online communities maintain high standards using the dedicated effort of tool-assisted human moderators?"

MetaFilter and RPG.net are two good examples of this.

Reddit as a whole is not — though individual specific groups may choose to apply a more strict hand and are invaluable for it.

I miss webrings, and discovering small communities through them.

onecommentman
I miss having an RSS feed reader in Safari.

Sites like this become the source for finding new sources for feeds.

I have no need or want for an intermediary app to get between me and my feeds. It’s a text feed, for crying out loud. One of Apple’s worst antiuser moves...all for the sake of Apple News that goes straight into Trash without reading? Every time I delete the email, it reminds me how shortsighted and arrogant Apple can be. So I get a daily dose of antiApple by way of Apple themselves. Hurrah?

MetaFilter is slanted in the content presented...used it heavily in its early days. Yield rate plummeted to near zero so skipped it...I assume I aged out of its content.

Instead of webrings, I collect blogs that have embedded a miniRSS list of followed blogs. Can glom together a decent RSSish feed in a particular topic of interest from them.

jasonv
I’ve been noodling on a variation for holistic fitness.
graeme
The covid19 research subreddit is quite good: www.reddit.com/r/covid19/
newbie789
The Somethingawful Forums have been a great example of how to run a community for over 20 years. There's a subforum for pretty much everything. That being said, it's absolutely not for everybody and it can be immensely difficult to figure out the culture and how to fit into it.

I wouldn't have my job, house or partner if it weren't for them though!

rswerve
Metafilter is the one that comes immediately to mind. Their one-time $5 sign-up fee and long history of high standards keep out casual trolls and low-quality comments.
rayrag
Skyscrapercity.com for architecture, construction, urban issues etc. One of my favs, mainly because it's a old school forum so no upvoting/downvoting, no algorithms and no teenagers. Quality may be varied though - depends of which regional subforum you are browsing.

Reddit - geopolitics, philosophy, printSF. Avoid main subreddits and use multireddits feature to connect similar subreddits into one feed.

slowernews.com

reaperducer
I disagree with the Skyscrapercity recommendation. I stopped posting there because there were too many very young, very inexperienced people promoting themselves as experts and jumping ugly with anyone who disagreed with them.

You could post something completely factual with references and contemporary media accounts to back it up and if it didn't fit the hive mindset, you'd be ridiculed.

Maybe it's changed. But when I was there, it was a bubble of groupthink.

[dead] UShouldBWorking
Short answer, no.

HN is good because there are a lot of people and content is always refreshed. HN people are linked more than anything by spending A LOT of time on the computer but not much else.

The second you branch out there simply are not enough people.

There are tons of sites that have tried it but they are somslow that the die pretty quickly.

Ask metafilter.is similar but more general but people there are A LOT dumber.

What makes HN great I'd there are a lot of non-idiots. It's gonna be hard finding a lot of people who aren't idiots and use the computer a lot.