
Ask HN: What are your other favorite communities other than Hacker News? - burtonator
Curious what other sites you use to get your news and daily geek fix from.<p>More interested in communities where everyone can participate. Forums, etc.<p>Not necessarily news sites.<p>For me I get most of the value from HN from what you guys have to say.
======
jakebasile
I spend a lot of time on Reddit, though I know HN likes to hate on it. There
are lots of subreddits that I enjoy participating in there and I can curate
what I want to be part of. I have a multireddit specifically for memes and
jokes, some for the different video games I play, and one big multireddit for
guns and related stuff.

The website is moderately usable but an independent app called Apollo really
makes it a pleasant experience on my iOS devices. Hoping for a macOS port
sometime.

Edit to add some specific communities:

/r/GunDeals is one of my favorites, but is incredibly dangerous to my wallet.

/r/CCW is a great resource for concealed carriers.

I know it's childish, but the various meme subreddits can be hilarious at
times. I like /r/historymemes /r/grimdank (warhammer memes) and /r/lotrmemes
among others.

I also keep subscribed to /r/Clojure and others but I get most of my
professional news from HN.

/r/DestinyTheGame and /r/DestinyLore are fun but the former can get a little
salty when things in game are changed.

------
inflatableDodo
'The Well' \- [https://www.well.com/](https://www.well.com/)

'Hackaday' \- [https://hackaday.com/](https://hackaday.com/)

'Slashdot' \- [https://slashdot.org/](https://slashdot.org/)

'Stackoverflow' \- [https://stackoverflow.com/](https://stackoverflow.com/)

Also, haven't used it for a while, but IRC is still going. #math on freenode
is apparently still fairly good, according to a few people I know.

~~~
bracobama
Is the well worth paying for? What's the community like?

~~~
inflatableDodo
I tend to drop in to read some of the public discussions, especially 'The
State of the World' every January, ever since that started. I haven't ever
paid to join, but if I ever get around to fleshing out some of my writing, I
intend to make the effort. It seems to be of most use as an authors group.

edit - here's a link to 'The State of the World, 2019' \-
[https://people.well.com/conf/inkwell.vue/topics/506/State-
of...](https://people.well.com/conf/inkwell.vue/topics/506/State-of-the-
World-2019-page01.html) \- it should give you a bit of an idea of the kind of
community they have.

------
pookieinc
As of a few years ago, I’ve taken up espresso as a (unfortunately expensive,
but fun) side hobby. One of the communities I visit is home-barista, it’s a
wonderful community full of people who love coffee, enjoy making it and
sharing their recipes and get the hands deep in the more technical aspects of
coffee-making. Other good forums are: coffeesnobs (australian, not as snobby
as it sounds) and coffee-geek (European).

The beauty behind all this is that third wave coffee has really taken off and
with it has followed a really cool, friendly, very global crowd.

------
balasan
[https://relevant.community/relevant/top](https://relevant.community/relevant/top)
has a good mix of technology and culture/society content similar to HN.

The voting is based on a pagerank reputation system. Users earn reputation
from getting thier comments upvoted and, in turn, increase the rank of the
posts they upvote. This makes rankings sybil-resistant making manipulation
harder and moderation easier. So far its been a great way to keep communities
focused and resistant to mob mentality.

Each community manages their own reputation system (admins are in the
personalization vector).

There is also a prediction-market mechanism overlayed on top of the rankings —
you can bet on post's relevance within a given community (this is abstracted
from the UX at the moment).

Disclosure, I'm the founder.

~~~
EForEndeavour
Interesting. Could you explain the prediction market/betting system in more
detail? Can users wager Coins, upvotes, or repuptation that they get back
multiplied by some factor that depends on the success of the post they bet on,
or do I misunderstand?

Also, TIL of the concept of a Sybil attack, AKA sock-puppeting:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sybil_attack](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sybil_attack)

 _> an attack wherein a reputation system is subverted by forging identities
in peer-to-peer networks [...] named after the subject of the [1973] book
Sybil, a case study of a woman diagnosed with dissociative identity disorder.
The name was suggested in or before 2002 by Brian Zill at Microsoft Research_

~~~
balasan
Users can wager Relevant Coins (not reputation) on the quality of posts. This
is done via a 'bonding curve market maker'
([https://blog.relevant.community/how-to-make-bonding-
curves-f...](https://blog.relevant.community/how-to-make-bonding-curves-for-
continuous-token-models-3784653f8b17)). The market maker mints 'shares' in
exchange for staking Relevant Coins. The more shares are outstanding the more
expensive they are, thereby rewarding early participants.

Not that the actual ranking of the post is determined via the pagerank
algorithm which is independent of the coins and betting.

If the post has a higher ranking than average it gets a portion of the newly
minted tokens — kind of like block rewards. These rewards get distributed to
all the users that staked on the post proportional to the amount of shares
they own. Everyone also gets their original tokens back. So in reality this
it's prediction market 'light'. All users pay a 'tax' on their token balance
via the inflation rate and but get a chance to win a portion of the pot by
participating in curation.

The betting mechanism is similar to and inspired by Steemit. Except they don't
use reputation ranking to resolve the market. Steemit posts are ranked by how
many tokens were staked on them, so a whale can basically force the market and
get all the rewards — self-fulfilling prophecy. In our case its is more akin
to an actual prediction market where the prediction is separate from outcome.
At scale the prediction market can actually be a useful way to surface
recommendations.

------
dredmorbius
RSS.

Mercilessly tightly curated email, mastodon, diaspora, and reddit.

But really: books. Mostly books.

~~~
gen220
This. I feel like the secret to being meaningfully informed is maintaining a
balanced signal:noise ratio.

Over time, I’ve come to realize that this is fundamentally impossible without
“mercilessly tight” moderation, and tools/services that give you that power
(RSS, email), because the state of the world is 1 part signal to 99 parts
noise.

Books, and by extension libraries, are a viscerally physical representation of
this principle. Much of what’s in a library is noise, but the signals are
sustained, dense, and often unlike anything you can find on the web. However,
like the web, signal tends to cluster around certain authors and publishers.
There’s still a moderation problem (picking the right book), but over time
your verification algorithm (is this book signal or noise?) gets faster and
“mercilessly tight”.

I don’t have much of a conclusion, but I’ll end with questions this raises for
me. I wonder how this idea interacts with “echo chambers”? Aren’t we
constructing personal ones with these tools and resources? Is that necessarily
a bad thing?

~~~
dredmorbius
There are a lot of books. Many are bullshit. Most are not worth (and never can
be) read.[1] Going to primary sources helps, they're almost aways preferred to
commentaries, though guides and maps may help. I span new material via
bibliographies and citations frequently. This helps, somewhat, to burst
bubbles.

I'm currently curating from a listing of 25k+ law articles on a topic of
interest. Availability of those (free, online) has a huge influence. Thanks to
the Library of Alexandra (Sci-Hub) and LibGen.

Adler's _How to Read a Book_ is quite useful -- the synoptic approach
especially.[2]

Making rapid assessments of suitability is crucial. Being prepared to revisit
those assessments, either way, later, also. Developing indicators of crap or
possible gold help immensely. Again, see Adler.

I spend considerabe time with older sources. They're often known to be wrong
or inaccurate, but:

* The path they reveal in development of understanding is often hugely useful. To understand the bug, it helps to know how it came to be.

* The rhetorical and ideological battles to which they may have been part is _usually_ now known, often spent. Literature -- science, technology, fiction, philosophy -- is all tremendously ideological, and being removed from the frame under which it was constructed, or being aware of it, helps immensely.

* One often finds one's own crazy notions expresed there, sometimes partially, sometimes far more clearly. I've generally found that the questions I've been most concerned with are in fact long-standing ones.

* Much current discussion retreads older thinking, though aparently unconsciousy and/or in complete ignorance.

The Copyright Abyss -- many materials published since 1924 -- is aboth a
hinderance and a blessing. It's not complete (LibGen, Sci-Hub, ZLibrary, Open
Library via Archive.org), but it _is_ sufficiently effective that it tends to
force consideration of earlier works.

________________________________

Notes:

1\. The US Library of Congress houses 24 million catalogued books and over 168
million items in total.[3] Its annual reports show about 300,000 new book
additions annually, a remarkably stable rate, since the 1950s.[4] Bowker
issues about 300k ISBNs annually to traditional publishers, and another
million to 'untraditional" (self-published) authors.[6] Google have estimated
129 million books were published, ever.[7] And there's the question of how
many books _can_ matter, culturally. About 3/4 of Americans read at least a
bok a year,[8] which suggests a floor somewhere around 60 books over a
lifetime. Given that there are other informational channels, how much
information _must_ be transmitted intergenerationally to preserve culture --
technically, socially, values, etc? "Of the making of many books there is no
end, and much study is a weariness of the flesh."

2\.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Read_a_Book](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Read_a_Book)

3\. [https://loc.gov/about/general-information/#year-at-a-
glance](https://loc.gov/about/general-information/#year-at-a-glance)

4\. [https://loc.gov/about/reports-and-budgets/annual-
reports/](https://loc.gov/about/reports-and-budgets/annual-reports/)
[http://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/000072049](http://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/000072049)
[4]

5\. One of the exceedingly rare cases in which Hathi Trust is actually useful.

6\. [http://www.bowker.com/tools-resources/Bowker-
Data.html](http://www.bowker.com/tools-resources/Bowker-Data.html)

7\. [http://booksearch.blogspot.com/2010/08/books-of-world-
stand-...](http://booksearch.blogspot.com/2010/08/books-of-world-stand-up-and-
be-counted.html)

8\. [https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/10/19/slightly-
fe...](https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/10/19/slightly-fewer-
americans-are-reading-print-books-new-survey-finds/)

------
zantana
Metafilter [https://metafilter.com](https://metafilter.com) still has
interesting comments and occasionally unique content, besides the links which
bubble up everywhere. It's pretty heavily politically left, which, along with
heavy moderation has driven away a lot users over the years, but sometimes
still has some nuggets you don't see on other aggregators. It is much more of
a community than most of the other sites, with lots of rules and sub-sites,
but I've only read the comments.

Twitter has been surprisingly useful since I started using last year. If you
only follow accounts in a specific area of interest it really allows you to
discover new things. The hard part is dealing with power poster/users since
they can quickly dominate your feed, but they also can bring in new areas of
interest. It's too bad they don't have better tagging curation tools.

Serializer [https://serializer.io/](https://serializer.io/) is a meta-
aggregator which grabs stuff from HN, Ars, some Reddit forms and others, not
sure if this counts or not.

------
cocoapriest
Can't believe nobody has mentioned
[https://www.techmeme.com/river](https://www.techmeme.com/river) yet.

------
implements
Refugees from the UK's Guardian newspaper talk board ended up here:
[https://justthetalk.com/](https://justthetalk.com/)

Big enough to be interesting, small enough to become familiar with individual
posters.

------
Jackim
Skyscraperpage for local development news. Cyburbia for urban planning in
general.

------
Causality1
News and community are two very different things to me. I get a lot of news
from Ars Technica but their forum community is extremely toxic and mob-driven,
not helped by the active side-taking of their staff.

Platforms I love like Imgur can be very useful but I think the use of point
ratings on comments discourages honesty and turns discussion into point-
hoarding pageantry.

------
fcoury
MechanicalKeyboards on reddit hands down :)

~~~
8bitrebellion
FountainPens and Programmer_humor

------
imakwana
bogleheads.org for investments and personal finance advice.

------
theodorewiles
Metafilter

------
nickpsecurity
Lobsters:

[https://lobste.rs/](https://lobste.rs/)

It's a slower-moving site with lots of CompSci and programmer-focused stuff.
People also regularly share what projects they work on, what's going on in
their life, or maybe what they're reading. Still has a small community feel
despite over 10,000 views a day.

Lobsters and Hacker News are my must reads each day. They're both great. :)

~~~
riku_iki
It doesn't look like lobsters have enough content for everyday reading..

~~~
nickpsecurity
Some days, the front page won't change much if at all from previous day. There
will be stuff in Recent and Comments coming in that might be highly
interesting. Some of these people will drop a whopper of a comment days after
it's posted. I usually have stuff to read every day.

Checking now, fro added a paper on fuzzing for side channels in CPU's 30 min
ago. Might have missed it if I just looked at morning feed but not later in
day.

------
fastbeef
Not sure how it holds up today, but a few years ago Yospos on Something Awful
was a dumpster filled with nuggets of gold.

------
dakics
devRant

Aside for stupid memes, every now and then there is a story that temporarily
cures my impostor syndrome / helps my everyday struggle seem like a fun day at
the beach compared to crap some (fellow 3rd world) developers have to go
through to make a living.

------
nestorherre
Mostly indiehackers, which I check out daily along with HN. With HN and IH I
already spend a lot of time everyday, not sure if I could handle another
community. Although from time to time I checkout r/startups.

------
RMPR
Reddit : /r/programming

Twitter : to follow some personalities in the field I'm currently interested
in

Telegram : I like the devs network, mainly the Linux group chat of this
network

~~~
RMPR
I forgot the irc channel of emacs on freenode network.

------
Huhty
[https://www.snapzu.com](https://www.snapzu.com)

Disclaimer: I'm one of the founders.

------
RickJWagner
Bogleheads.org

Because knowing how to handle money is a multiplier. Among the ways to spend
your time, it's got a high payback.

------
rcardo11
Twitter is a double edged tool. It can be terrorific as it can be fantastic
depending on who you follow

------
AndrewKemendo
twitter

I have curated it to the point where I almost never see anything political and
there is a lot of really good content. It's all computer vision, computer
graphics, demoscene, black/grey hat and startupy type stuff.

~~~
narag
How do you curate Twitter? I have my account inactive since forever because I
wasn't able to deal with the flood of messages.

~~~
AndrewKemendo
Make sure you are super careful who you follow, Mute a lot of people and use
the "I don't like this tweet" judiciously.

~~~
Shorn
I signed up to Twitter and followed exactly one account: Material-UI (a React
component framework). I don't login to Twitter very much, I redirect the email
notifications to my RSS feed. Every third email has no content related to
Material-UI, it's just random ads-as-tweets about TV shows, movies and US
politics.

------
hikarudo
mrmoneymustache forum

personal finance and so much more.

[https://forum.mrmoneymustache.com/](https://forum.mrmoneymustache.com/)

------
cnees
Neopets.com :)

------
rambojazz
freepo.st

------
nicolashahn
lobste.rs is basically HN without the politics.

~~~
valec
tildes.net is similar in that it’s good but it does have politics

~~~
AdamGibbins
Sadly its invite only and I know nobody with an invite. If anyone fancies
throwing one my way it'd be appreciated.

~~~
pard68
The hand them out on their subreddit. Took me three minutes from posting to
getting an invite from one of the owners of tildes

~~~
AdamGibbins
Thanks

------
kaycebasques
Technical writers don’t have any strong online forums, I’ve been working on
cultivating reddit.com/r/technicalwriting as our main watering hole.

I’ve recently started browsing reddit.com/r/webdev and am finding it to be a
pretty lively source of web development discussion.

Twitter gets a lot of flak but I find it helpful for getting a pulse on
different communities.

Aside:

> I get most of the value from HN from what you guys have to say.

If you’d like to cultivate HN as a place where women and non-binary people
also contribute, consider using “you all” instead of “you guys”.

Edit: Looks like I’m getting downvoted for the “you guys” comment, which I
expected. I know that it’s usually just an old habit but I also know that
being thoughtful and correcting that old habit means a lot to some people.
Considering that we’re talking about online communities it seemed relevant to
bring attention to here.

~~~
shrimp_emoji
I thought "guys" was accepted as gender-neutral now, like "dude".

That said, in trying to force congruence in my idiolect, I once referred to a
woman as "this guy", and it felt so wrong. It still feels wrong. My mind reels
in disgust as I'm typing these words right now. It doesn't work. So maybe we
need to go the other way. But why does "dude" work?

Also, everyone becoming agender when? It's the best way to cut the knot and
have egalitarianism. Seriously I mean come on already.

Unless the concept of gender is a psychological technology that gives people
with gender dysphoria a target to aim at while they reconcile their
inscrutable brain-body disagreements and so abolishing gender would harm their
therapy. Unless² those disagreements stem from our still having genders. Let's
hope that what it is because damn. Unless³ gender is also a biologically-
salient component of people to the point where we can't ignore it without it
resurfacing and re-creating the problems we tried to get rid of it to begin
with for. I hate everything.[0]

0: [http://www.chicagonow.com/listing-beyond-
forty/2017/05/40-ge...](http://www.chicagonow.com/listing-beyond-
forty/2017/05/40-gender-neutral-alternatives-to-saying-you-guys/)

~~~
balfirevic
> I once referred to a woman as "this guy", and it felt so wrong

"Guys" might be considered gender-neutral, but "guy" is not.

------
trpc
I am going to get banned for this, but 4chan's /g/ is unironically a nice
place

~~~
shrimp_emoji
No, it's not. It's a terrible place full of extremely dumb and sad (but
technologically curious) kids.

But it can be hilarious. Yesterday, there was an HN post and a /g/ thread
about Intel's new CPU, and the discussion was so parallel -- the same noises
of neuroticism and pessimism, but in HN delivered in pedantic paragraphs and
on /g/ distilled in crude, biting brevity.

For that reason, I linked the thread and got downboated. I don't regret it.

------
thehoomanist
I have some tildes invites. Shoot me an email at yesreply (at) hoomane (dot)
org with just a link to another profile of yours to make sure we keep the
community full of nice humans. I’ll send you back one to the email you used.

~~~
simonebrunozzi
[https://hoomane.org/](https://hoomane.org/) and
[https://www.hoomane.org/](https://www.hoomane.org/) seem to be down at the
moment. HN's "hug of death", or simply some downtime?

