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Do you know any other good online communities?
So far I only managed to find two online communities in which people are able to hold a productive discussion and share interesting stuff - Tildes and LessWrong. Do you know if there are any other great online spaces like this?
MetaFilter (wiki) is a general-interest group blog that's been around since 1999. The front page gets 10-20 posts on a wide variety of topics every day (popular posts/comments, best-of blog), and there's also subsites for questions and answers, TV and movie discussion, personal projects, music, meetups, etc. I've been a member for over 15 years and really enjoy the cozy community feel and indie Web 1.0 vibe that's increasingly hard to find in this era of huge platforms (though Tildes is a similar place ofc). Over the years, some of the most fascinating and valuable things I've ever found on the web have been thanks to MeFi, and I'm not the only one.
They've been having a tough time the last few years since Google halved their inbound traffic overnight (and with it their ad revenue), but have slowly transitioned mostly to voluntary member donations to pay the half-dozen or so staff and keep the site running. It nominally costs $5 to join (mainly a spam-prevention measure) but you can request a free account if you need to (I can also gift an invite if you PM me!)
(Note that the community is generally progressive and the guidelines are explicitly pro-feminist, trans friendly, against microaggressions, etc., so it's a different feel than a more techbro site like HN or a pure rationalist place like LW, but if you value that in a community it's a great choice.)
Ooh, this is neat. Thanks for sharing. I love these old-school web places and it's good to see some still live and are active.
LessWrong has always been a puzzle for me ... I am fascinated by Yudkowsky, I largely share his views on the future of Tech and AI, and I am really interested in the things that LW espouses ... and yet, every time I start to dive into the site, I always feel like I'm slipping into some sort of Korean UFO Doomsday cult, and as a result, I rarely stay there long.
Just peeking around at it now, I notice that there was originally a co-creator with Eliezer, named Robin Hanson, who branched off to do his own cult-of-personality community blog/forum/thing called Overcoming Bias ... IDK yet, if he/it is any good, but I'm starting to check it out now, and it looks interesting ... perhaps you'd be interested as well?
I agree, that's why I don't read AI-related stuff on LessWrong either. I know that many people use it primarily for AI-related discussion, but I actually just completely blocked the "Artificial Intelligence" tag on the website. Other stuff that gets posted there is much more interesting for me.
Yeah, it is a pretty popular blog in the LessWrong community, I've read a few articles from there and liked them. Although out of LessWrong-adjacent blogs, my favorite one is Alexander Scott's blog (old articles on Slate Star Codex, new on Astral Codex Ten). LessWrong actually has a list of best SSC articles, you can check some of them out, they're pretty interesting, and there are some cool short stories under the "interlude" subsection in every section of that list
Yup, same. The whole Roko's basilisk circus killed him for me.
One that comes to mind would be Hacker News. Mostly tech-related as you might guess from the name.
Yeah, I do follow Hacker News through RSS, but the actual community/comment section is not always that great
There's a lot of smart commenters but many of them have distasteful opinions, and seem to love splitting hairs.
IMHO hackerNews is a really good site, but comments sometime feels really toxic, and you definitely can't have unpopular opinion. Not mentioning strict moderation where 'sensitive' topics are forbidden because thats 'flamewar'.
Honestly I started to have the feeling that sites with downvotes at some point became quite toxic. Im not sure how to resolve this issue technically, or even if it possible to resolve..
I feel like hacker news has gotten a lot worse since the Reddit drama. There was always an issue with commentators nitpicking articles to death. But these days there are way more meme jokes, flame wars, and honestly just a lot more downvoted comments.
It's gotten a lot worse since the cryptocurrency boom (and subsequent bust), generative AI hype, and waves of hysterical companies doing layoffs in the last year.
The problem is, while you'd think Hacker News would be a haven for interesting programmer types, it has a large streak of MBA types (or rubes who follow them) smoking the Ayn Rand crack pipe.
A random commented on HN lately: mentions not being able to find a job since getting laid off.
Every HN response to this person: Eff you, you piece of garbage, you probably can't find a job because you took a 10 week coding challenge and got a job at google and now that you were laid off you can't find anything, you deserve it because you were never meant to work a tech job in the first place. While we're at it, eff you one more time for a good measure.
I can't believe how many negative comments on HN there are lately. Unless you're 100% in agreement with the WFH crowd and you make $300k working for a startup, then you might as well be a nazi.
Considering the responses you brought up, I feel like being a Nazi could be a virtue in some of these people's eyes...
It reminds me of Reddit c. 2012, for better and worse. You will have pretty good takes and decently involved discussions with experienced people on some very niche subjects, but you can quickly see what topics are a pain point.
I can tell that the reddit exodus has slightly shifted the tone there, though. There's always been that "not that great" section of HN, but you can usually avoid it if you don't click into more political threads (i.e. just like Reddit 2012 with r/politics). But I can see it seeping more and more into the general site. Not to a bothersome degree (to me) but if you've seen reddit transition, you start to see similar cracks. Fortunately,
HN does have a few facilities available to make it harder to fall into reddit's trap:
The Midnight Pub is a forum I've been on for around 6 months now, and has a very personal feel to it. "Quaint" would be a good way of describing it. Most of the posts I see on it feel like someone actually talking to a little crowd, which is something I rarely ever see on social sites.
What an odd little site. I can't tell, is there roleplaying involved? I see some users ordering drinks to the bartender.
What's this speakeasy section, as well?
Yeah, to my understanding there's some element of roleplay centered around people 'visiting' the pub and interacting with each other and the user
~bartender, who they treat like an actual bartender the way one would in an actual bar.As for the speakeasy, aside from just being an smaller extension to the larger Pub, I'm not really sure. It's pretty neat though!
Wow, it’s exactly like this BBS I used to be on back in the 90s. Pretttttty cool looking.
Woah that looks cool. I also clicked around a bit and it seems like it has an entire webring-esque thing going on?
Also, just as I thought "this would've been a perfect fit for the Gemini protocol", I opened the manual page and saw that it does, in fact, use Gemini.
Haha, this is so cool, what a fun little site. Bookmarked to come back to have a better look later. Love the little arcade machine with a few games on it as well.
I’ve enjoyed being on Pillowfort, which was created back in 2018 when a lot of people were leaving Tumblr and has had a significant second wind with all the people looking for alternatives to Twitter. It’s described as a cross between Tumblr and LiveJournal, which I can’t fully attest to since I never used the latter, but it basically has Tumblr’s tag system with communities to post in based on various interests. There’s a lot of art, writing, and other creative content, but it also has a healthy discussion space focused on various topics like literature, internet privacy, and various fandoms. It’s got an invite system, but I was able to sign up for their rolling waitlist and get an invite in less than a day. I also like that it’s completely user-funded and that the developers are very open with the community about their progress.
I'll cosign PillowFort.
It's small at the moment but growing. The admins do really care about the site and give complete reasons as to why they make the decisions they do. The transparency is refreshing. A lot of the requested features are still in development because the team is so small.
I'd recommend it to anyone wanting a quieter homey space to hang out.
Quick heads up, you didn't link it properly.
I'm checking it out through the demo account, and it looks fairly interesting! Gives me Tumblr vibes, but more organized. Also, the fact it has a demo account feels like a sign of how much the site's developers care about the quality.
For others' awareness. You only get a vertical scroll bar if you accept cookies. Since I have this add-on in my browser it was causing me to not see the cookie notification and also not showing the scroll bars (Which prevented me from scrolling).
There's lobste.rs, which is a tech oriented community that seems a bit nicer than hacker news. You usually need to get an invite from another user there to participate. It doesn't seem to have the assholish strain of users that some forums have.
If there is one online community I wish could be resurrected, it would be kuro5hin. That was a nice community in its early years, 20 years ago. Or maybe binrev's old forums.
I'm trying to help grow the Readup community. They're a bunch of nice people, but not really enough to form a proper community yet.
That looks interesting, thanks! I signed up for the waitlist for the Android app.
If you get tired of waiting, their Firefox extension works great on Android! Though installing it is a bit of a hassle.
Thanks for the advice, though I don't use Firefox on my phone because it's not recommended to use on GrapheneOS
I still find decent discussions regularly on IRC (Libera and OFTC) but the communities I'm in are pretty small and mostly focused on FOSS related subjects.
My go-to recently has been the science, tech, philosophy, and memes channels on https://warpcast.com/
For the past few years my favorite places on the internet have been pubnices and tildes (such as those of the tildeverse).
I found the tildeverse while clicking around on https://midnight.pub which someone recommend to me in this thread, but I didn't really understand what it is.
I mean, I do get the idea of a tilde being a single Unix computer where you get a home directory to make stuff, but does that mean it is essentially just a free web hosting service with a small community around it as a bonus?
I guess you could say that, but I have always seen it the other way around. *nix systems are social by design, and the early pubnices (and the ones still in existence like sdf.org) can be seen as a natural outgrowth of that. At base, you interact with others via the shell, and modern systems have tons of games and utilities that facilitate this. Usually there is some form of bulletin board, email, chat, etc. In some places people get up to generative art, ascii art, programatic music creation, creative writing, zines, and all kinds of stuff. Historically they were a great way to learn about unix systems and/or programming. I think that still applies! Actually, for me they were the gateway drug into programming :b They are also great places to hang out if you are into self-hosting because you can see first-hand how another system is confgured and operated (plus you can benefit from the vast knowledge of all the other users).
Yes.
For gaming news, i always end up at www.bluesnews.com