8
votes
Are there any other sites similar to this one?
Hacker news and lobsters pop up in these threads as answers pretty quickly but I find them to be too tech focused, not subdivided into communities, which reinforces these few focuses and make finding large amounts of related content hard. Also the lack of delineation between responses makes the discussion difficult to follow. (At least to me.)
So basically I'm looking for sites that:
-
Have some sort of subdivision of their content
-
Aren't very focused on any one thing
-
Have some sort of thread subdivision
-
Value good discussion
So does anyone have any sites?
Hubski is a forum I'd been a part of for a long time. It's noticably different from the Tildes/Reddit model or Hacker News, in that's the very communal and community-driven.
The moderation tools there are user-centric. There's an admin, but they intervene only if security is concerned or someone's shenanigans have been way off-the-charts. Most of the time, what you do is mute other people to varying degree.
I think Hubski's model is Reddit's original libertarian model perfected, or at least made work on its level. It has few people, most of 'em known each other pretty well, many hang out whenever they can. Given that it's a tight-knit community akin to a small town, conversation there sometimes run wild. It's not to say there's a bad atmosphere: it's just that it can be off-putting how straightforward people talk there.
The latter is something I've been seeing on Tildes more often lately, but it's still more of a public forum than it is a communal place to gather and share. Hubski's the opposite. You get the discussion of news articles, but you also get many personal posts, and celebrations, and one member asking about another publicly 'cause the original member was lost to time and someone wonders about them.
If it sounds appealing to you, you might enjoy it. If it doesn't, that's okay: it's its own specific thing.
One of the ways I think about social-media/community sites is that each one is somewhere on a spectrum between being "content-centric" and "user-centric".
Something like Twitter is almost entirely user-centric, where the focuses and ways you interact with the site are mostly based around specific people. Reddit, HN, and Tildes are down at the other end of the spectrum, quite far towards the content-centric side (though Reddit is making some changes to try to be on both sides lately).
Hubski always felt to me like an attempt to build a reddit/HN-style site on the people-centric side, and it was actually built as a modified version of old HN code.
I remember Hubski! I had an account there 6 or 7 years ago but I never really got hooked in. Glad to hear its still alive and kicking. If I remembered my login maybe I would pop in to say hi :)
I can't actually think of any other sites with those precise characteristics. Voat and Notabug are both much like Reddit but not so much with a focus on "good discussion" as really just allowing any discussion at all, good, bad or otherwise.
What you describe sounds much like any classic large forum, but with threaded conversation? Is that about right? If so: any forum that uses Discourse as it's forum software arguably will do.
Although it's very young, and far less active than tildes, I find Karma interesting. IIRC, it's basically a very polite forum for studying things as a community, and Eve (the creator) has plans to redistribute money the site makes back to users, like a form of universal basic income. Very interesting stuff, I'm keeping an eye on it.
You might be interested in looking at MetaFilter, and the discussion sub-site, Ask MetaFilter.
These sites have become backwaters (likely because they lack engagement promotion mechanisms such as popularity ranking features for topics), but they incorporate most of what you've requested. [Comments are not threaded.]
They're still interesting, both for relatively high-quality content and historical reference on evolution of online social discussion sites.
I'd echo Death in the forum point, except I really don't like how Discourse is designed. I feel like I can't see anything.
However, the forum thing has got me thinking -- I've been wanting to find some kind of writing-focused community, and I was looking for a link aggregator -- but I should try a forum.
And now I'm thinking about it, that's the difference between fora and sites like Tildes: discussion vs. link aggregation. Which are you looking more for?