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Ask HN: Why are there no indie product dev chatrooms?

3 points by prohobo ↗ HN
I used to be part of ##reddit-gamedev on IRC, where every noob (sometimes pro) would go and talk about their problems building games and the theory of designing games in general. It was scrappy, and it was great. I used to get real feedback on my projects and had very deep conversations about games in general. We taught each other some of the golden rules of indie game development, and hashed out disagreements endlessly. There was even a guy who would often come by and start explaining why quaternions are inferior in 3D graphics, and would link his "paper" about a new theoretical mathematics system for optimizing not just rotations but collisions or something. His arrival always sparked an hour long flame war about why his idea was bad.

There was actual enthusiasm to engage with other people, whether it was to disagree, or to help. That kind of mutual support and mentorship among people who are enthusiastic about building things is missing now. There are, of course, niche communities where you can have deep conversations about some things, but not indie app development - although I've seen a lot of enthusiasm in crypto development specifically.

Now that IRC has mostly gone away, everyone is on Discord. But, I've joined at least 20 servers over the past few years looking for anything that had a reasonable community, and I've found nothing.

Everything I've looked at (Indie Hackers, r/startups, Hustle Army, Solo Entrepreneurs, etc. etc.) is either dead or full of hucksters trying to sell their products to the people in the server/forum/channel.

Does anyone know of any chatroom that isn't terrible? Is it all just crypto now?

4 comments

[ 10.4 ms ] story [ 27.2 ms ] thread
tconfrey
have you looked at indiehackers?

https://www.indiehackers.com/

muzani
I'd categorize them as bad too. There's part of the community I like, but they're just too amateurish.

I wish amateur communities combined better with professionals. Ideally it should be the pros mentoring amateurs, but it usually ends up as amateurs mentoring amateurs and trying to mentor someone with much more experience than them.

prohobo
I have no problem with amateurish communities (as I explained in the OP), because community mentorship is still a hell of a lot better than nothing. My problem with IndieHackers is that there's very little mentorship, and a lot of upselling, treating the forum like a marketing tool.
prohobo
Yes I have, and while it does seem to be the best community out there, I don't quite like it.

Very few of the threads are about genuine problems, most of the time people are trying to get exposure for their project by pitching it to the forum. It just feels gross.