Ask HN: Are there any good discussion forums left?
When most people think of a forum, they probably think of Reddit. But Reddit is a news aggregation site, not a discussion forum. It is constantly pushing new content, old content is not meant to be consumed, and it is also not meant for meaningful discussion. This is reflected in the awful search feature, upvotes, etc.
A kind of site that was probably well known to most in the early 2000s and later was the forum. Threads could go on for years, and responses could be incredibly in depth.
Are there any active sites like that today?
32 comments
[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 68.1 ms ] threadIf you fundamentally disagree with some important narrative, even if you're polite and provide evidence, you'll get voted down. Get voted down enough, and HN will rate-limit you, and even trying to continue to participate will be taken as hostile activity, and you'll be shadowbanned.
Submit an article that's timely, informative, well-sourced, etc., but goes against the narrative? It'll be flagged without justification. Submit it again? It'll be marked as a dupe, and you're at risk of being shadowbanned.
Talking about any of this is against the rules. They think it's "boring" to hear numerous indisputably true examples of their misbehavior. Do it, and you'll be flagged, or shadowbanned.
I don't want to discount you, but I'm skeptical. You are new and I'm guessing you got banned.
That's fair, but I'm not actually new. If you really joined in 2017, then you're many years newer than I am. Yes, I've been shadowbanned many times. I've lost count. Maybe thirty times?
Most of the time it's hard to link to the evidence in such a way that you could see it for yourself. I'd like to link you to submissions of mine that got upvotes and had conversations going on, but were then anonymously flagged without justification, but it's not possible to link to them. It's not possible to see from the outside that an account has been shadowbanned without comparing the behavior of logged-in and non-logged-in accounts.
Example of a wrong, unacceptable viewpoint: humanity is not actually on the brink of climate catastrophe due to CO2 emissions. Recently there was a fearmongering article from Nature about climate doom, and I linked to sea level graphs generated by NOAA that showed linear, rather than accelerating change in sea level, and was apparently shadowbanned for that. Obviously, linking to NOAA in support of a climate doom comment would not be a bannable offense.
Edit: oh, and I've apparently already been placed in some kind of slow-play mode. I responded about an hour ago, but you can't see it. Are most people aware stuff like this goes on on HN?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16576569 , and
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16578715
Both these posts reached front page, with lively and active discussions. Both were quickly flagged.
I would have some difficulty thinking of a more important topic.
This post on it was also flagged, then unflagged once it would never reach front page: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16579219
Dang's comment was that the links "didn't fit site guidelines". This is despite the fact that people clearly found the story important, interesting, and were having constructive discussion about it.
Posts about this censorship quickly rose, attracted discussion, and were then flagged and deleted. Posters were banned.
What other stories are treated like this? How would we even know?
If this post somehow reached front page, I'd expect it to be flagged too; as off-topic, or too meta, or against site guidelines. People would pop up like clockwork to defend the decision, praise the site's moderation, etc.
Its either that or ban all accounts made after, say, 2015 and have membership be invite only as Lobste.rs does.
I can understand the opposition to this - i've clashed with the mods, been flagged and slowbanned, I get downvoted to oblivion every time I give an opinion that goes against the zeitgeist of a thread - but Hacker News is what it is.
If you want to discuss CIA torture, this isn't the proper venue. But if you want to color outside the guidelines, you have to realize you've become the problem that this culture wants to rid itself of, and eventually it will.
And to answer the dead comment below: a lot more political stories probably need to be flagged here than are - I think the bar for "interesting new phenomenon" needs to be a bit higher. I don't see the value in threads about the withdrawal from Afghanistan, for instance. It's a worthwhile news story, but the threads are generating more smoke and heat then light.
> If you want to discuss CIA torture, this isn't the proper venue.
OK. But it is the proper venue to have a group moan and hand-wringing session about impending climate disaster a few times a week?
> if you want to color outside the guidelines, you have to realize you've become the problem that this culture wants to rid itself of
I think this is actually a great way of stating my point (no sarcasm): that HN is a curated echo chamber, which is very different from what it claims to be.
Second; CIA torture is American torture. It's important to discuss it, here and elsewhere, until it stops. But it's an off-limit topic. Not cool.
Many other people who voted the story to the top three times in one hour agree that it's worth discussing here, and they voted the story about its removal to the top as well.
You may feel this isn't the proper venue, and dang may feel that way too. But there's no evidence that's the majority view; in fact there's quite a lot of evidence to the contrary.
The purpose of this forum is to gratify intellectual curiosity. Righteous, even justifiable, anger about American war crimes or anything else doesn't satisfy that goal. Most political threads don't lead to any insights, rather they tend to degenerate into cynical piss-takes and partisan rancor. That may satisfy the impotent rage one feels about an unjust world or grant an endorphine hit by dunking on one's ideological enemies, but as far as content goes, they're usually an intellectual wasteland.
Hacker News isn't going to solve the world's problems. This is mostly a place for bored tech nerds to waste time avoiding the real world. If you want speech to lead to practical results, get involved in political activism.
>You may feel this isn't the proper venue, and dang may feel that way too. But there's no evidence that's the majority view; in fact there's quite a lot of evidence to the contrary.
For better or worse (I think it's both,) the majority doesn't rule here. Hacker News isn't a democracy, it's an oligarchy - rule by elites. The majority getting what it wants is practically the definition of Eternal September.
That's why downvotes and flags are weighted more heavily than upvotes, so the few can override the will of the many. And when the elite minority gets it wrong, the mods step in and start turning knobs.
That doesn't matter. HN isn't for everything, no matter how important that thing may be. Flagging a story doesn't mean "I think it's unimportant", it means "it doesn't belong here".
That might be what flagging is supposed to mean, but that's not the reality. For example, climate doom apparently "belongs" on HN. But submit something that suggests that climate doomsday might not actually be imminent and watch it be anonymously flagged (i.e. hidden and all ongoing conversations obstructed) with no explanation or justification.
Many people commented on why that story was important, and of interest to the tech community.
As I've pointed out, the story was upvoted to the front page, and removed, three times in an hour.
That all shows the story was clearly of interest to the community, but overruled by a very small number of people who decided they know better.
While some people can apparently argue that helping to censor discussion of war crimes is good for this forum, against the expressed will of this forum, it's telling that no debate or discussion was allowed.
Pay me.
> why that story was important, and of interest to the tech community.
Neither matters. Set up your own forum and do it your style.
I'm genuinely not interested in your take.
> Neither matters. Set up your own forum and do it your style.
OP asked for evidence of censorship and "wrong viewpoints"; I gave it.
I mean, 90% of the political threads here could probably be written by an AI, they're so repetitive.
That's the way it goes on HN every day, but the evidence is quickly hidden, supporting the illusion that HN is a good place to discuss things, when it's actually only a good place to discuss things for people who basically already agree.
Doesn't it just feel bad to be dishonest?
Btw, goatse ascii art is not a "viewpoint". Well, I suppose it is in one sense.
If you don't want to be banned on HN, you could try the approach that I've recommended to another user with a similar history here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28191897.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I only have to create new accounts because I get unjustifiably banned. Or, if you consider simply telling the truth to be grounds for banning someone, I consider my point that HN is not actually a good place to discuss things made.
> something this community would strongly disapprove of if people knew about it
That's an interesting idea. Have you asked users what they think of shadowbanning people?
How many comments just in this thread are hidden? How many of those hidden comments actually contain anything objectionable? Have you asked users what they think about hiding comments that don't contain anything objectionable? Shouldn't we make sure users approve of it? That was a good enough standard to apply to my conduct -- shouldn't it be good enough to apply to yours, and HN's in general?
> Btw, goatse ascii art is not a "viewpoint".
Not sure what this is supposed to mean. Have you been punishing me for what somebody else has been doing?
Oh, I'm sorry—I just realized I confused you with someone else on that point. It's unrelated to the other issues though, and not affecting moderation.
A lot of car forums survived redditification, probably because those communities are run by car enthusiasts who passionately care about every detail and would never surrender control to a benevolent central authority just so that they don't have to do slightly more work maintaining the site than they otherwise would have.
Search for almost any popular sports car and you're sure to find extremely popular forums that date back to either the early days of the internet or when the manufacturer started production.
- I am the creator.
- It is a link aggregation site like Reddit and HN, but the link field is optional.
- Threads are never closed.
- No front-end JavaScript.
- No voting.
- There are actually no admins or moderators. Instead we show nothing by default and users must whitelist other users.
- Open source: https://github.com/ferg1e/peaches-n-stink
- This probably sounds like a crazy site but it appears to be working and I've had some nice convos with some of the users.
Lots of open source project use it as web ui for mailing list
My answer to your question is, other than HN, probably nothing else is reasonable.
While HN is mostly by and for coding peoples, it oft provides interesting discussions of engineering, science, and society. My remaining favorite discussion forums are densely technical and increasingly narrow in scope, so would not meet your requirements.
I do wonder if there is value in having basic interfaces. This combined with tech focus seem to have created 2 of the better discussions/information sites IMO (whirlpool and HN).
While a bit more domain specific, webmaster world used to be good, still might be but I haven't been visiting for a couple of years: https://www.webmasterworld.com/