Ask HN: What are your other favorite communities other than Hacker News?

[burtonator]

Curious what other sites you use to get your news and daily geek fix from.

More interested in communities where everyone can participate. Forums, etc.

Not necessarily news sites.

For me I get most of the value from HN from what you guys have to say.

[jakebasile]

I spend a lot of time on Reddit, though I know HN likes to hate on it. There are lots of subreddits that I enjoy participating in there and I can curate what I want to be part of. I have a multireddit specifically for memes and jokes, some for the different video games I play, and one big multireddit for guns and related stuff.

The website is moderately usable but an independent app called Apollo really makes it a pleasant experience on my iOS devices. Hoping for a macOS port sometime.

Edit to add some specific communities:

/r/GunDeals is one of my favorites, but is incredibly dangerous to my wallet.

/r/CCW is a great resource for concealed carriers.

I know it's childish, but the various meme subreddits can be hilarious at times. I like /r/historymemes /r/grimdank (warhammer memes) and /r/lotrmemes among others.

I also keep subscribed to /r/Clojure and others but I get most of my professional news from HN.

/r/DestinyTheGame and /r/DestinyLore are fun but the former can get a little salty when things in game are changed.

[inflatableDodo]

'The Well' - https://www.well.com/

'Hackaday' - https://hackaday.com/

'Slashdot' - https://slashdot.org/

'Stackoverflow' - https://stackoverflow.com/

Also, haven't used it for a while, but IRC is still going. #math on freenode is apparently still fairly good, according to a few people I know.

[bracobama]

Is the well worth paying for? What's the community like?

[pookieinc]

As of a few years ago, I’ve taken up espresso as a (unfortunately expensive, but fun) side hobby. One of the communities I visit is home-barista, it’s a wonderful community full of people who love coffee, enjoy making it and sharing their recipes and get the hands deep in the more technical aspects of coffee-making. Other good forums are: coffeesnobs (australian, not as snobby as it sounds) and coffee-geek (European).

The beauty behind all this is that third wave coffee has really taken off and with it has followed a really cool, friendly, very global crowd.

[balasan]

https://relevant.community/relevant/top has a good mix of technology and culture/society content similar to HN.

The voting is based on a pagerank reputation system. Users earn reputation from getting thier comments upvoted and, in turn, increase the rank of the posts they upvote. This makes rankings sybil-resistant making manipulation harder and moderation easier. So far its been a great way to keep communities focused and resistant to mob mentality.

Each community manages their own reputation system (admins are in the personalization vector).

There is also a prediction-market mechanism overlayed on top of the rankings — you can bet on post's relevance within a given community (this is abstracted from the UX at the moment).

Disclosure, I'm the founder.

[EForEndeavour]

Interesting. Could you explain the prediction market/betting system in more detail? Can users wager Coins, upvotes, or repuptation that they get back multiplied by some factor that depends on the success of the post they bet on, or do I misunderstand?

Also, TIL of the concept of a Sybil attack, AKA sock-puppeting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sybil_attack

> an attack wherein a reputation system is subverted by forging identities in peer-to-peer networks [...] named after the subject of the [1973] book Sybil, a case study of a woman diagnosed with dissociative identity disorder. The name was suggested in or before 2002 by Brian Zill at Microsoft Research

[dredmorbius]

RSS.

Mercilessly tightly curated email, mastodon, diaspora, and reddit.

But really: books. Mostly books.

[gen220]

This. I feel like the secret to being meaningfully informed is maintaining a balanced signal:noise ratio.

Over time, I’ve come to realize that this is fundamentally impossible without “mercilessly tight” moderation, and tools/services that give you that power (RSS, email), because the state of the world is 1 part signal to 99 parts noise.

Books, and by extension libraries, are a viscerally physical representation of this principle. Much of what’s in a library is noise, but the signals are sustained, dense, and often unlike anything you can find on the web. However, like the web, signal tends to cluster around certain authors and publishers. There’s still a moderation problem (picking the right book), but over time your verification algorithm (is this book signal or noise?) gets faster and “mercilessly tight”.

I don’t have much of a conclusion, but I’ll end with questions this raises for me. I wonder how this idea interacts with “echo chambers”? Aren’t we constructing personal ones with these tools and resources? Is that necessarily a bad thing?

[tomjen3]

Books are good; no arguing that.

I am however very much interested in how you find the email lists to curate.

[cocoapriest]

Can't believe nobody has mentioned https://www.techmeme.com/river yet.

[zantana]

Metafilter https://metafilter.com still has interesting comments and occasionally unique content, besides the links which bubble up everywhere. It's pretty heavily politically left, which, along with heavy moderation has driven away a lot users over the years, but sometimes still has some nuggets you don't see on other aggregators. It is much more of a community than most of the other sites, with lots of rules and sub-sites, but I've only read the comments.

Twitter has been surprisingly useful since I started using last year. If you only follow accounts in a specific area of interest it really allows you to discover new things. The hard part is dealing with power poster/users since they can quickly dominate your feed, but they also can bring in new areas of interest. It's too bad they don't have better tagging curation tools.

Serializer https://serializer.io/ is a meta-aggregator which grabs stuff from HN, Ars, some Reddit forms and others, not sure if this counts or not.

[implements]

Refugees from the UK's Guardian newspaper talk board ended up here: https://justthetalk.com/

Big enough to be interesting, small enough to become familiar with individual posters.

[Jackim]

Skyscraperpage for local development news. Cyburbia for urban planning in general.

[Causality1]

News and community are two very different things to me. I get a lot of news from Ars Technica but their forum community is extremely toxic and mob-driven, not helped by the active side-taking of their staff.

Platforms I love like Imgur can be very useful but I think the use of point ratings on comments discourages honesty and turns discussion into point-hoarding pageantry.

[fcoury]

MechanicalKeyboards on reddit hands down :)

[8bitrebellion]

FountainPens and Programmer_humor

[imakwana]

bogleheads.org for investments and personal finance advice.

[theodorewiles]

Metafilter

[nickpsecurity]

Lobsters:

https://lobste.rs/

It's a slower-moving site with lots of CompSci and programmer-focused stuff. People also regularly share what projects they work on, what's going on in their life, or maybe what they're reading. Still has a small community feel despite over 10,000 views a day.

Lobsters and Hacker News are my must reads each day. They're both great. :)

[hwj]

I just saw Lobsters can send new stories and comments as plain text emails. With an advanced MUA (e.g. mutt) you could probably implement your own scoring algorithm.

(I'd appreciate an invitation, too: <hnname>@secure.mailbox.org)

[riku_iki]

It doesn't look like lobsters have enough content for everyday reading..

[mrzool]

I’ve been lurking for months but don’t have an account yet. Do you (or someone else) happen to have an invite to spare? Would be very appreciated. Email in my bio.

[ioddly]

I'd also appreciate one [email protected] if anyone happens to have one. Have been lurking for a while and interested in participating.

[danielecook]

Can I get an invite? danielecook at gmail dot com

[messe]

Can't recommend https://lobste.rs enough. If anybody has an invite to give out I'd thoroughly appreciate it.

[fastbeef]

Not sure how it holds up today, but a few years ago Yospos on Something Awful was a dumpster filled with nuggets of gold.

[dakics]

devRant

Aside for stupid memes, every now and then there is a story that temporarily cures my impostor syndrome / helps my everyday struggle seem like a fun day at the beach compared to crap some (fellow 3rd world) developers have to go through to make a living.

[nestorherre]

Mostly indiehackers, which I check out daily along with HN. With HN and IH I already spend a lot of time everyday, not sure if I could handle another community. Although from time to time I checkout r/startups.

[RMPR]

Reddit : /r/programming

Twitter : to follow some personalities in the field I'm currently interested in

Telegram : I like the devs network, mainly the Linux group chat of this network

[RMPR]

I forgot the irc channel of emacs on freenode network.

[Huhty]

https://www.snapzu.com

Disclaimer: I'm one of the founders.