I will often have a thought or a question, but find it difficult to find the right venue to have a discussion about it.
Reddit always seems to have the best design for such discussions, but the moderation is frustrating. There are so many rules about who can post, and often subs are heavily biased and censored.
Quora often pops up for questions but its more a reference than a place for discussion.
Maybe some kind of search engine for forums.
HN is one of my favorite places on the internet - the themes, the people and the tone are really cool. But the ephemeral nature of posts is not good for discussing ideas. Threads for debating ideas in depth should last forever, as they did in forums.
I wish HN launched a forum feature, or that someone built something in parallel and they saw a massive influx from the HN community.
If someone has ideas on how to pull this off I’d be happy to contribute - I can design and code full-stack. My requirement to hop on board would be that we somehow manage to tie it to the HN values, themes and audience - I wouldn’t be so interested in an ex-novo community-building exercise.
Maybe we could start with some structured discovery work, gathering opinions from existing HN users - we know where to find them! - and take it from there.
As a rebuttal to your point though:
- All debate, from Socrates to this part, is bound to be heated and messy by nature.
- HN discussion is some of the very best I’ve experienced on the net. Like I said, the ethos, themes and people are great. Discussions ranging from OCaml, to startup financing, to befriending crows? Dope. The CEO of Stripe dropping in to comment? Dope.
- The permanence of a forum would mitigate some of the issues you point out (though not all - forums have never been impervious to mean or hot-headed users)
Its understandable to a degree. Most here are probably NOT the primary reason why management needs to be around but still it can often be like Reddit that way.
I have mulled over going public with my account because i agree with you, its easy to flame to just act a fool under the guise of anonymity when you generally know it may be hard to get to you in the real world, just how discussion doesnt devolve so quickly as often in public. BUT there are too many crazies out there that are more than willing to take a simple disagreement of opinion to crazy heights that I don't see the risk/rewards.
As I have gotten older though, I have gotten better about recognizing when someone is simply dug in or flaming, especially in the first reply or two and simply dis-engage. Not always, we all have our bad days, but I try to be better about it.
Also, i noticed your account is new, but im not sure if you are new here. But wanted to add this, as it can help facilitate discussion
Strongly disagree on that. In an academic environment, I regularly observe and participate in exacting debates that remain cool-headed and civil. Now, the ability to do this takes effort to develop, but incivility in debate is just a mark of laziness and immaturity.
Once you have Facebook-style mandates or recommendation algorithms and voting mechanisms (like Youtube and Reddit), that goes out the window. Now, people look for and find the "popular" perspective or the algorithmically-favored perspective instead. By removing the work from the process, they have turned off the critical thinking that was involved.
I spend less time on Reddit and less time discussing because some subs ban or restrict based on seemingly arbitrary rules and they vary from sub to sub so unless you really dig into a sub’s rules you won’t know that you’re not allowed to “have your words cause harm” by criticizing an idea because that sub has a rule and bans.
I don’t think this is conducive to good discussion because it directly removes people with good intentions from the discussion and discourages speech that may trigger a mod to make an arbitrary ban.
it's very difficult to have civil discussion on Reddit if you go against official Reddit hivemind, but yeah there are smaller subs where even conservatives/centrist/right can discuss
The reality is that if your opinion, no matter what it is, is disliked enough to overcome the default positivity bias (upvotes exist in higher frequency than downvotes), you will be democratically silenced.
This often affects the framing and scaffolding of your comments more than the core content, and encourages a style of writing that inherently seeks mass appeal.
There's something about the average highly upvoted reddit comment that just feels like a reddit comment, to the point that you can even ask ChatGPT to generate a highly upvoted reddit comment about "X" and it does a pretty good job.
What do you mean by moderating on Reddit being frustrating? Are you trying to argue counter to observable fact?
To the first point, there are automod rules setup to prevent brigading that end up preventing lurkers from making their first contribution. This may be what they've experienced.
To the second point, what are observable facts that are not arguable? Isn't the whole point of science that everything can and should be arguable as long as you follow the method?
But the only place for this right now are some niche forums and 4chan.
Reddit and quora rely on "reputation" and vote not in arguments.
So it is more like an echo chamber.
On 4chan there is no "names/nicknames" no "reputation" or points.
Your argument has to stand on its own and will be teared apart.
The immaturity of such behaviour wears thin quickly after the first few laughs, unless you like the company of a-holes (can't think of a better term).
We have govt, companies, celebrities, teachers all so used to lying that when someone talks truth it "cracks" the social norm.
We even say that someone is "too naive" when they are honest about their opinions.
If you want to pursue real talk and truth you must be ready to some harsh exchanges.
BB.net is almost legendary for how brutally unwelcoming it is. The 10th planet forums see both a lot of hostility on the topic of practical combat and street fights, and has a huge contingent of borderline schizoid conspiracy theorists because papa Eddie never met a lizard man he didn't believe in. Reddit fitness and Instagram fitness seem to be primarily dedicated to the goal of self aggrandizement and self promotion, and they don't feel like a real place for conversation.
The various rationalist spaces are at worst filled with pedantry, and at their best home to useful in depth discussions on very niche topics.
Some forums are good, but the majority seem to have a serious problem with the user base aging up and becoming very cliquish. I actually wish I knew why this clique behavior was so much more common on message boards than just about any other comms medium.
Reddit is mostly pretty bad, and as you mentioned seems to have poor moderation down to a near science. I actually think a lot of particularly bad mod practices and also common hostile mod-user interactions are driven by Reddit's global karma as a primary or secondary effect.
But over the years of being on IRC and growing list of communities and friends I have a few that I join for particular areas of interest but as for an all in one 'directory' I'm not too sure if one exists.
It doesn't even have to be a controversial or topic-based sub, and the comment doesn't even have to be a politically or socially-sensitive issue.
Well, depending on how you define "discussion". Nine times out of ten, when I see this complaint, it's because what they call "discussion" I'd call "trolling"...
My experience is also different than yours, I guess it's based on the subreddit
If the same C folks are there, agreed.
That said, in my experience, most of these communities are closed, but generally happy to invite people from one closed community to another.
Also need to invest time and energy on twitter search (https://twitter.com/explore) with know-how on search operators (https://github.com/igorbrigadir/twitter-advanced-search) to find the right topics and people you want to have a conversation with.
Having to invest time and energy in search is one reason and then also the threading and topic selection is all over the place. There’s no sense of community for me.
It also seems like a lifestyle choice where a large amount of time has to go into it. Whereas I used to be able to drop into slashdot or kuro5hin or plastic or netslaves or reddit and check in without having to be always on.
Also look around for smaller, more specific subreddits. As a general rule, the bigger the subreddit, the more moderated it will be.
Discord has been recommended. I'm backing it up. Same principle about moderation and size apply.
It wouldn't hurt to look at the comment section of a related blog post or even a YouTube video. The latter is scraping at the bottom of the barrel though.
My solution is to "meditate" on the ideas and write blog posts, so that I don't bore my friends with the topics, anyone can read the blog or contact me if they really want to.If what you really want is to re-examine controversial or contrarian positions (i.e. restart old flame wars), many places will not be very keen.
If you really want a platform to be heard, start a blog with a comments section and learn to promote it.
If what you want is a venue to test your logic against others who are similarly motivated... join an IRL debating club.
If you want to learn from experts, try YouTube channels and then go where they engage with their support base e.g. pay them on Patreon. Expert subreddits are good too if you are willing to play by the rules.
If you just want to shoot the breeze about casual topics, Twitter is still there.
(edit: formatting)
I wish there was no downvote feature here and you could flag anything publically only with publically stating reason for flag without abusing this feature anonymously.
If I were looking for good discussion on a particular topic, I would present my arguments in a post on my blog and enable comments. I think Chris Coyier's CSS Tricks website is a good example of this. He can moderate, set the topic, and set the tone.
https://boardreader.com Have not used it in years but it used to be good.