
Ask HN: Is there anywhere as intellectually curious as kuro5hin used to be? - kick
It seems like kuro5hin from 2000 to 2006 or so was just about the best WWW forum of all time. Trolling and bad jokes, sure, but the discussion quality was higher than just about anywhere discussing technical topics on the WWW today. Where&#x27;s the equivalent today?
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Mister_X
It's a different time, the net world changed forever after AOL got the
"masses" on-line.

slashdot, kuro5hin, usenet, a few other choice places, all either gone, or
polluted by willfully ignorant voices.

Or outright mean spirited, aggressive trolls, like Rusty of kuro5hin found out
the hard way, poor guy.

You may find Metafilter of interest.

I'd be interested in other places as well, I never found a replacement for
those lost treasures of the early net.

I still have my tattered original kuro5hin T-shirt, can't wear it, but can't
bear to throw it out.

~~~
btilly
AOL got the "masses" on-line in 1993. That caused
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September).

All of the sites that you named _except_ Usenet postdated that event.

~~~
generalpass
AOL began to get really big when they launched unlimited minutes, I think '96
or '97\. The unwashed masses adopted a few years later. AOL of '02 was nothing
like AOL of '97.

~~~
geoelectric
I wouldn't put too much gloss on that. I was on AOL from its original
GeoWorks-based release forward, and it always had _considerably_ more mass
appeal than icb/forumnet, IRC, Usenet, or any of the other Internet-based
forums/chatrooms of the time. It was night-and-day.

You have to remember before there was AOL there was Prodigy, Quantum Link/PC-
Link (which became AOL), CompuServe, GEnie, etc--all services that were mass-
marketed to some extent and had healthy user bases that were mostly not very
technical or academic. Modems were easy to use and ubiquitous at that point so
if you had a computer at home, there was a decent chance you had one.

A lot of the early AOL folks consolidated from those services and the social
BBS scenes, which were also not nearly as techie as you'd imagine.

So yeah, there were a lot _less_ of us than when they started shipping out
discs with hundreds of hours and later unlimited, but the audience wasn't
necessarily more sophisticated. As soon as it was a standalone app and not
GeoWorks-based, in particular, it seriously took off.

------
fullStackOasis
For anyone with historical interest, here's that last HN post by kuro5hin's
owner:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11609308](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11609308)

> Hey so this is Rusty -- What happened was basically that Internap shut down
> the data center we were in and had to move the servers, and I conspicuously
> failed to Deal With Things around that. The content is probably not gone
> foreve

------
muzani
I guess the requirement is that it can't take itself too seriously. People can
discuss what they like. Nobody is trying to hunt down people with an
unpopular, sincere opinion.

I've seen a friend share something from a space colonization site - what an
absurd idea, but also fun and interesting. Too bad I didn't keep the link.

Some of the old forums are still good. Something Awful is still up there,
still a little funny, still a little interesting, but feels a little stale.
Bay12 (Dwarf Fortress) forums are good, but have become really tight knit that
it's might feel a little clique-ish. Still a good place to discuss those kinds
of games. I'd bet the Paradox games forums are good too. There's some erotic
RP forums which I won't link, but those usually are good places because they
attract a lot of Asperger's people who are educated, good at writing, mature
enough to discussing anything at all, and it's very tightly moderated.

~~~
downerending
> Nobody is trying to hunt down people with an unpopular, sincere opinion.

It was a different time. One could posit crazy ideas, play Devil's Advocate
for all sorts of horrible positions, and even be an outright asshole, with
little consequence other than _maybe_ being dropped into a lot of kill files.

Compare that to what happened to Tim Hunt or RMS more recently. Hard to see
how we might get back to the older ways. Maybe people will start opening up
illicit "speakeasys" where people can, well, speak easily, without fear of
life-altering consequences.

------
duxup
Oh man I used to post on there, but I'm not sure I'd call it unusually
intellectually curious.... but hey why not.

~~~
kick
When did you stop? It seems like 2007 was the point of no return for most of
the users posting the really meaty content.

~~~
blacksqr
You mean, the year after Facebook opened to the public?

~~~
kick
More importantly the year when Rusty gave up on trying to fix the site.

------
forkexec
I think one issue with any high-signal commenting platform is there's has to
be some sort of standard minimum threshold and investment of
emotional/intellectual effort/funds/time to apply. This reduces the tendency
for destructive behaviors and low-signal convos.

------
tmaly
I could remember reading kuro5hin. Before that we had usenet. I think back
then when it was only tech savy people, everyone followed an implicit code of
conduct.

Private chat groups are the only place I see now that are like that.

~~~
barefootcoder
The word netiquette was used a lot in the very early 90s. I suspect few of
today’s users have even heard the word. It’s an unfortunate digression.

------
cable2600
There isn't any that I knew of.

[http://kr5ddit.com/](http://kr5ddit.com/) tried to do it but went down as
Alpha Racks went dark. Now it is a chat forum.

------
drannex
Not sure how Kuro5hin was, but tildes.net may be something of interest.

I have 10 invites available right now, and I am not affiliated with them —
just enjoy the discussions and community that are growing.

~~~
Deimorz
(Tildes is my site)

The best explanation of the site's goals and values is still the original
announcement blog post: [https://blog.tildes.net/announcing-
tildes](https://blog.tildes.net/announcing-tildes)

Here's the discussion on HN at the time too (note that the site was totally
private at that time and you couldn't even view it without an invite yet):
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17103093](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17103093)

I assume drannex will run out of invites soon (thanks for offering them!), so
if anyone's interested in an invite please feel free to email the address in
the blog post and I'll send you one tomorrow. It's not intended to be
difficult to get an invite, I just want to keep the growth controlled while a
base site culture and more features continue getting built up.

