Ask HN: Where can I discuss random ideas?
I often have a thought or insight and I want to have a conversation about it with interested people. Usually the quality of discussion is best on HN. Sometimes you get a good response to an Ask HN, sometimes it doesn't feel like the right place to post it.
I always struggle to find the best place to generate the best discussion. It's like its spread across Reddit, Discord, Slack, HackerNews, Twitter, etc.
Anyone else struggle with this?
69 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 121 ms ] threadRealistically to get traction on discussions, you need traction so people feel like they’re actually conversing with others. Beyond that, feel like a lot of people underestimate how many users only read/vote on content, but never comment; much less comment with in a way that’s meaningful. Using ChatGPT with structured set of questions, user could rapidly generate more surface area to solicit additional discussion.
My rough estimate is anyone taking part in an idea forum would need to spend multiple more time contributing to others in return for get significantly less contributions back.
Another, unrelated option is to directly contact an expert on the topic, but again, unless you’re actually contributing value back to the exchange, this is going to also have limited returns.
https://www.dpreview.com/forums
Often the first answers I get are from people who don't know what they are talking about but then two weeks later somebody jumps in who has an absolutely great answer that changes my practice.
I'd contrast that to discord where I've occasionally gotten help with things but frequently there are people with too much time on their hands who are introducing the forum to newcomers while the knowledgeable people are elsewhere.
"Ask HN" has a similar temporal problem in that questions usually fall off the bottom of newest/ without any answers.
I know people say there are good discussions on Reddit but personally I can't stand the memes (but people complain that I post links like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9pUaeLtXM_A to HN), I dread following any links to Twitter because it makes the people in Idiocracy look smart, ...
https://stackexchange.com/sites
Another being Google, but focusing on advanced search techniques.
I find the stackexchange paradigm to be broken. To do what I want to do on those sites (write a comment to call out a wrong answer) I'd have to spend a lot of time doing meaningless activities to get my karma up. Stackexchange in particular breaks the link between answering narrowly defined questions and open-ended discussions. In programming today the place where you most need insight from other people is in choosing libraries and frameworks, a discussion which is forbidden on stackoverflow. Mostly you're not allowed to ask questions where you couldn't get the answer from the documentation. It might be a struggle to find answers in the docs, but if you do so you will get the right answers. In SO you will get 30 answers, most of which are almost right -- the person who actually knows what they are talking about is disgusted by the SO game and the possibility that their right answer won't be recognized in a sea of wrong and almost right answers.
There was a trade publication that licensed a copy of their software which was administered a little differently from others and realized pretty quick I could put up a good score by asking questions, I deliberately made myself the #2 user on the site but didn't aim for #1 because it didn't seem fair. I was curious about if you could do the same on stackoverflow and stackexchange but found that the scene is a bit different and you really can't.
If this sounds interesting to you, or anyone, send me a mail with your Discord name. It's quite small, with half a dozen regulars for now. EDIT: a dozen peeps now!
I made it because no, there is no place to talk randomly with strangers on the Internet. IRC has died and we've lost the chatrooms you can enter and leave at any moment's notice, without needing someone to invite you or agree to 50k rules to be let in.
The internet has become terrible for casual, real time conversation with strangers, unless you really like shouting into the void.
Just like Bitcoin is dead I guess :)
IRC lives on, I frequent many IRC channels, most of them on Libera.chat nowadays. Plenty of interesting people to talk about.
Although, for some stuff, NNTP might be better.
https://discord.multiprocess.io
Probably internet friends if you have niche interests. But yeah, you're not going to get high quality discussions on arbitrary topics from strangers.
You also need to have a halfway decent bullshit/unfounded-confidence detector when reading replies. This was less necessary a decade ago (in terms of the nature of replies to questions, obviously not in terms of posts in general).
There's an excellent range of people there, and most are quite helpful.
I've found it useful for discussing my side projects when I can't find someone who is willing to read what I've written and engage with me.
As an example, https://i.imgur.com/afXNZaR.png here I am having an extended conversation about lore for software I am writing.
I thought I would easily tell chatGPT about a plot device from a book, but I did not realize that my understanding was limited. In failing to convey my idea to chatGPT I realized I needed to dig deeper and switched from explaining to learning.
Ultimately, I realized that I was trying to describe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystal_detector#Cat_whisker_d... which, while not directly identified in the conversation, was something I was able to surface by having had the thought-provoking talk.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paranoia_(role-playing_game)
The idea of ants using a crystal for radio wave detection is in that book as well :)
And thanks for this, I reached out to Adrian to promote awareness of my idea based on this feedback since it's so apparent where my ideas are drawing from :)
Here's the email thread:
Go for it with my blessing, sounds like a great project!
Adrian
---
My name's Sean! I'm reading Children of Time. It's amazing and thought-provoking, thank you for all your hard work.
I'm also really big into ants and was stoked when I read about ants on your world and their interactions with the crystal / messenger.
I'm writing some software as a hobby. It's going to be something like an online Tamagotchi meets mental health app. I'm trying to get people journaling and meditating by having them nurture a virtual pet.
To that effect, I decided the virtual pet would be an ant colony. I then started trying to build some lore around it. A daily-check in means there's a window of time when the check-in occurs, kind of like when the satellite had LOS to the ant colony. The satellite had a biologist on it. Makes sense that biologist would take notes on their ants and I can draw parallels to that to promote journaling, etc.
I just wanted to be respectful of your work and let you know that I was planning on building something that honors a small sliver of the lore you outlined in one of your books. I'm not ripping verbatim, taking any of the names, there are no spiders, etc. If you felt incredibly strongly about wanting me to avoid this then I'd respect that. Conversely, if you were curious to hear more about how I am riffing on your idea, then I'd be happy to elaborate or share more.
Anyway. Hope you are well over there. Thanks again for all the content. Cheers.
Sean
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33921604
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33922637
I feel that by referencing a concrete example of a conversation I had with GPT that others elevated their perception of my response from mere gossip to ~fact.
I literally was able to build an android app that interfaces with chatGPT, I'm thinking it might be cool to also create some sort of web scraper that scrapes many pages, for instance all of the 'how much have you earned with sideprojects pages' on HN, then summarize data from 50+ webpages into bullet points. It doesn't have access to the internet but that doesn't mean you can't GIVE it access to the internet, through the prompt...
Some people are afraid of misuse, but others are just surprised that the advancement of tech is now applying to them. I empathize with the feeling, but I don't know how to be genuinely sympathetic as it seems to be the nature of the beast.
I don't think ChatGPT can hold 50 webpages in its short-term memory, but maybe. I have found it starts to lose shape of specific details we talked about after I drench it in information.
If anyone has any ideas on how to create a community like this, I'd love to hear it. I'm really not a fan of chat rooms other than for casual chats between friends because there's no search engine indexability.
I guess in the meantime, I'd say Twitter is probably the best I think. Everyone's on there, and people are incentivized to increase their following. I just wish they'd do away with that 500 character limit since that confines longer form writing to Twitter threads and makes actual dialogue totally impractical.
Many other extensions have tried the whole "comments on any website" thing but that always runs into the same challenge of the network effect
What's needed is an aggregator that lets you see all the comments made on any website your on through all of these already existing communities.
I think it would actually end up benefiting smaller sites, especially if they have more of a focus on niche topics
There's halfbakery https://halfbakery.com I am chronological there.
Then there is Infinity Family https://o2oo.li
These are both idea sharing websites. Infinity family is kind of a financial think tank since you can invest time in projects and your additions are tracked. You can also list products to sell.
I journal my computer and software ideas in the open on GitHub. I have over 700+ ideas linked from my HN profile. Maybe you enjoy them and want to start your own idea repository.
It's still mostly text and a good medium for conversations.
My solution to this has always been to have some real human friends interested in the same things I am, and when I have a crazy idea bounce it off them over coffee/beer (virtual or in person).
If you don't have any friends like this, I highly recommend building out a group of them. Most people with similar interests to you are surprisingly open to a call just to chat about a topic of mutual interest.
I've found that an hour long chat with a real person who is deeply engaged in the topic will almost always leave you with new insights and perspectives. Internet conversations tend to be less fruitful in my experience.
Inspired me to make a new kind of social network called Plexus (https://plexus.earth). No followers, no feed, just AI to connect people who have uncannily similar problems and ideas.