

Ask HN: What forums/communities do you frequent aside from HN? - rfnslyr

It could be any community around any interest. I&#x27;m trying to broaden my horizons in terms of communities.<p>I reminisce upon old days of forum browsing. After awhile it feels like your home on the internet. You know most users, you get personal with users, you develop a community. On websites like Reddit and HN it&#x27;s hard to establish that level so I&#x27;m looking to get back into foruming.<p>What are some cool communities out there?
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NovemberWest
Funny, I have spent years trying to escape the small town/small-minded feel of
most online communities. I favor larger sites these days, where there is
somewhat less entrapment or entrenchment due to personal politicking.

That being said, I currently spend more time on MetaFilter than on HN. I
sometimes don't show up here for months at a time. As an openly female member,
I have found this boys club in many ways less than welcoming. Possibly not a
good thing to admit.

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swanson
Ruby Rogues Parley - a paid email list (that is now a Discourse forum) around
the Ruby Rogues podcast.

It's basically a private forum for technical topics in Ruby. Pretty high
signal-to-noise ratio.

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chrisbridgett
At a risk of stating the obvious... StackOverflow/StackExchange. Not a forum
per se, but definitely a community. :-)

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rfnslyr
I mean in the more traditional forum sense. That layout still doesn't make me
feel like I know anybody, and it's missing the crapshoot banter/offtopic
forums.

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vezzy-fnord
Obviously Slashdot. It isn't quite as huge as it once was, but it's still
thriving and has some great headlines (though the quality of comments has been
stuck in Eternal September for a while now).

Then again if you're looking for message boards, I don't really participate in
any, so I can't help you there.

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Spoom
Slashdot still generates some great discussion and has quite a few smart
people participating. The moderation system is brilliant and keeps the
perceived signal-to-noise ratio of the comments high, even if there are a lot
of pointless comments (they're just made effectively invisible).

I still worry what Dice will do to the site when they inevitably get around to
redesigning the desktop interface. The new mobile interface is IMHO much less
functional than the old one.

