Right now the only replies list reddit and lobste.rs. That's really depressing :/
Are there really no other decent online communities out there? I'm increasingly disenfranchised with reddit and lobste.rs is invite-only (not my cup of tea). I've been poking around the various *chans to see if I can brave the noise and chaos in the hope that I'll occasionally find a similar calibre of info as what I find on here.
Unfortunately there's not much on the chans either. The ones I used to browse have generally been overtaken, even on tech/programming boards with threads complaining about diversity or they are thinly-veiled alt-right recruitment posts.
I haven't been there for a while, but Lainchan isn't all that bad. Quite slow, though.
Lainchan is pretty good but also glacially slow. Many threads stay open for years. The level of conversation is reasonably high as long as you stick to specific threads. The /g/ boards of the world are almost universally garbage.
Right, which is why I like Lobsters. The pace of Lainchan though is a bit too slow, even when I try to post. It's not that the content is bad, it's just that there's so little of it I eventually forget to check the site.
lainchain has a fairly civil and decent programming board, slanting towards beginners but still friendly.
You shouldn't cut yourself out over "invite-only", especially when the site itself tells you where to get an invite. It's a small speed-bump to keep out folks without basic politeness and problem-solving skills, not some sort of elitist thing.
The cold fact of the matter is that any community that pitches a wide tent and allows for everyone to join and talk about whatever is going to be unable to maintain a good signal-to-noise ratio...communities that wish to avoid that need to remain focused and conscious of what content they want and do not want.
It's possible to say "this is content that doesn't belong here" while at the same time not painting the content or submitter as deplorable.
If you have any interest in firearms or warfare/military history, /k/ can be surprisingly good at times along with operatorchan. Those are obviously very niche though.
These three tend to have a pretty high signal-to-noise ratio, particularly when asking very advanced and technical questions.
From personal interactions I can vouch for there being many senior to exec level industry folks from a healthy mix of ad tech companies, networks, agencies, brands, etc. on both the buy and sell side.
Everyone is pretty friendly, so while asking basic questions might just get you a link to go RTFM (and really the official docs are often the best starting point...) everyone is pretty friendly and helpful.
Great for those trying to learn more about digital media and analytics all the way up to people with questions or who want to chat about stuff in the industry like header bidding, attribution, enterprise analytics troubleshooting, etc.
And the best part is since we all are living and breathing advertising for a living, we have a pretty low tolerance for blatant sales plugs and content marketing spam like on some other subs.
In my opinion there isn't anything about Reddit that is like HN. It's why I stopped reading Reddit and came here. Too many haters and trolls on Reddit.
I found Lobsters some time ago through my blog analytics when one of my posts got some traffic from there. Reached out to my (limited) personal network in the tech sphere to see if I could land an invite, but nobody had ever heard of it. Didn't feel comfortable messaging random users for one, so I gave up. If anyone is monitoring this thread and sending invites, I'd love to have one.
Thanks, I appreciate the offer, but 4 people beat you to it by private email, 3 within 30 minutes....
When I've peeked in on e.g. the lisp subforum, it looked to be quite good, although that was a while ago, too frustrating to contemplate engaging without being able to be part of the conversation (which, I again emphasize, is an entirely legitimate method to avoid a variety of problems).
The community is mostly technical people with a large focus on programming, operations, and hackery. Fewer people comment on articles but the comments are lower noise on average. In a discussion on community standards, one of the veterans explained what the site should and shouldn't be about. I think the post represents what I've seen on the page & in the comments pretty well. Also, we have invitation trees instead of throwaways to encourage people to play nice. Been a few cesspools but not many.
It also illustrates there's a huge difference in priorities and culture between Hacker News and Lobsters. Not to mention who is participating. So, I like to read and comment on both sites as they each give me something different. People also often repost HN articles on Lobsters, too, with the Lobsters comments sometimes raising points I didn't see over here or vice versa. These two are my favorite sites for technical discussion for now.
On business side, you might like the Lobsters spinoff called Barnacles. It's open invitation right now. They're like HN for bootstrappers instead of VC-funded startups. High signal to noise ratio with good stuff on marketing & case studies of interesting business. Clifford's series right now is a good reality check for people that think doing a SaaS startup will let them focus on being paid to write code. Great opening pic, too. ;)
I suspected they might; but figured I'd make the offer as others might also like to try it out (and it seemed they did, I had a bucket of emails and sent invites out!).
I've posted a couple of things on there and although there seems to be a lot less traffic than HN/Reddit (at least for the posts that were to my blog) there quality of discussion seemed to be much better :-)
Two others in my office read the front page, but quite none of us have yet found invites (not that we've looked hard), but the idea of an invite only community sites feels counter productive
Literally nothing. Reddit is a cesspool and especially when it comes to technical topics it is absolutely abysmal. Most of the people spouting off opinions about technical topics on Reddit are totally unqualified to do so. People who work as cashiers at Taco Bell writing diatribes about Ruby vs PHP, etc.
Quite contrary to what you've written I find the Haskell subredit very useful. The comments are usually well thought out and relevant. I daresay the people on the Haskell subredit are the smartest and most helpful of any subredit I've been on.
Is HN and the Twitter/Medium/blog spehere different? We get devs with 0-3 years experience and no desire to look into past art writing with an authoritative tone all the time.
Unfortunately the same thing could be said about this site as of late. There are still some knowledgeable people here, but it appears eternal September has hit.
What are the qualifications for having an opinion on a technical topic? Ever since Reddit introduced subreddits, it has become a very dynamic place. Many moderators cultivate behavior similar to how it's done here on HN. Lots of subreddits are gems of community and threads like this are a great way to index those valuable parts.
Not a sub, but I'm a big fan of Designer News. I've been a daily visitor for the last 3 years. While it's more design-focused, many Users are UI Designers, Product Designers and people working in tech.
As a summary for those who are unaware: a (now former) mod of that subreddit, who is a major Go contributor, called for the deletion (or the discussion there of) of the subreddit due to the actions of the Reddit CEO. He did so believing that the subreddit was an official communication channel. Upon learning that it was community started, he changed his opinion. Many are very offended.
r/TrueReddit is the audition for HN and vice versa. Folks wanting to eke out karma arbitrage can just copy and paste between them, they track each other with about 12-24 hours lag.
Unfortunately that sub is as politically left as it can get. Downvotes galore if you dare to disagree with the agenda of identity politics.
Best part: they upvoted and agreed with NPR that lefties are impervious to fake news and can quickly spot it because of their superior reasoning skills.
Entertainingly, I find that many of the "lefties" I know read widely on all areas of the spectrum, and those of a certain timbre only read their bubble.
You'd never know that by the posturing on the part of those gentle persons of the bubble, but you're definitely not one of those, are you?
I dislike it because it is almost all politics discussion with many toxic posters. And they upvote snarky one line responses while downvoting anything that is remotely on the right as the other poster wrote.
It is basically a slightly more civil /r/politics with news stories only.
/g/ and /prog/ can be useful. There's tons of noise and beginner/toy threads, but competent devs can be found.
Can't speak for the other chans but I recall a chan with a competent user base dedicated to programming/hacking/rigbuilding a few years back. 1337chan or something? Abused the green on black theme if anyone else remembers.
Meh, it's alright. I've found it to be completely dominated by people who are only interested in or talk about deep neural nets. That's fine I guess, it's certainly popular. But there are vast areas of applied machine learning that rightly use other techniques (deep learning isn't AGI!) and it's really frustrating to try to ask questions about RF Tree Pruning or SVM kernel functions only to get a bunch of vacuous "you should try deep learning" comments.
For deep learning quality is high (and it rarely misses important stuff). But I share your frustration that it is "deep learning news", see this post of mine: https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/4el597/is_... (Though, in the last month deep learning is my main focus, so it is OK.)
There is really so much out there and everyone has there own personal interests. Just check out https://www.reddit.com/explore which will give you personalized recommendations based on the subreddits you are already subscribed to.
There was a good discussion of this a while back -- one user here made a multi-reddit of the suggested subreddits, in this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7255336
It isn't hard to get an invite if you're even partially competent. Then again, it is invite only to keep out the sort of camp following mouth breathers that are taking over HN.
There's a difference between dissing HN as a whole, and dissing the growing subset of the userbase that has lowered the technical content of the site and decreased the civility and level of discourse.
That, or you mods aren't doing your job in keeping this site sufficiently attractive to hackers--if you were, threads like this wouldn't be necessary.
The first step to solving a problem dang is admitting you have a problem.
