The Something Awful forums have lots of interest-based subforums for things like woodworking, wrenching on cars, etc., that are generally high signal-to-noise.
> They still exist, although there is still a lot of hand-wringing over whether forums are "dying" or not.
My understanding has been that forums aren't dead -- the centralized, fast-food version of the forum, reddit has just won out for the usual reasons.
What sets HN apart is it's moderation/curation. It feels like the HN hivemind is still smarter than me so I learn a bunch when I'm here, and people try to argue in good faith so that's good too. Creating and maintaining such an atmosphere (and getting your users to reinforce it) is hard.
There are also quite a few forums for different subjects around, I find. You just have to know what you want and where to look for it. The three forums I spend the most time on are Sinister.ly, survivalistforums, and melonland
The quality of discussion there is orders of magnitude lower. Also, any topics having anything to do with current politics/culture wars are tribally segregated and heavily censored. For some niches that managed to avoid CW entirely there's some good content there though.
I don't think it's really possible to have a HN-quality level of moderated discourse on some other site.
People come to sites through a shared interest, so frankly, I wouldn't want to discuss economics and politics on Bodybuilding.com message boards. Nor would I want to discuss say, design, on a politics forum.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 52.9 ms ] threadWhat you're really looking for is a forum. A bulletin board, to use the outdated parlance.
They still exist, although there is still a lot of hand-wringing over whether forums are "dying" or not.
Long form journalism won't go away, long form discussion won't go away either.
My understanding has been that forums aren't dead -- the centralized, fast-food version of the forum, reddit has just won out for the usual reasons.
What sets HN apart is it's moderation/curation. It feels like the HN hivemind is still smarter than me so I learn a bunch when I'm here, and people try to argue in good faith so that's good too. Creating and maintaining such an atmosphere (and getting your users to reinforce it) is hard.
https://boards.straightdope.com/
People come to sites through a shared interest, so frankly, I wouldn't want to discuss economics and politics on Bodybuilding.com message boards. Nor would I want to discuss say, design, on a politics forum.
https://forum.bodybuilding.com/showthread.php?t=107926751