Where do you discuss computer related stuff now?

https://lobste.rs/s/ih3cwj/where_do_you_discuss_computer_related

by EstesPark • 3 years ago

131 120 3 years ago

lobste.rs

sundvor• 3 years ago

For myself: Discord groups in my Sim (racing+flight) communities.

NoPicklez• 3 years ago

For me the mainspace for discussing computer related stuff is still Reddit.

/r/pcmasterrace still has 8 million members and /r/buildapc has 6 million. The viewer counts for these subreddits have only increased even in recent months.

HN still has excellent discussions whether its Ask HN or links

Was there a problem that begged asking the question in the first place?

code_duck• 3 years ago

Yes, the rationale is briefly described in the exposition to the question. Following recent events such as sudden API price hikes resulting in discontinuation of most 3rd party reddit clients and clumsy communication from the admins, discontent with reddit has been higher than usual recently. It has resulted in reddit alternatives such as Lemmy growing exponentially in the past 1-2 months.

whoknowsidont• 3 years ago

Was there a problem that begged asking the question in the first place?

I thought the post stated it as concisely as possible. 3rd party clients are being shutdown on reddit, Twitter is, well... doing something. HN isn't an "ask forum", or really a forum at all. I have my personal opinions about the subreddits you mentioned but I won't presume to imply anything that the OP wasn't meaning to say.

Sometimes people get lost on the internet when things shift and that appears to be what happened here. OP is just searching for some new outlets. It's a question that will certainly come up again as long as the internet continues to change.

You might even find yourself asking it one day.

thefz• 3 years ago

Even the most obscure technical subreddits (such as bikewrench) are now reduced to users posting a photo and asking "how to fix" or "what is this". Reddit is a dumpster fire and barreling fast to its death. Quality of discussion is abysmal.

Prcedural• 3 years ago

Various discords

deelowe• 3 years ago

Any suggestions?

eloisius3• 3 years ago

Same. At first I was skeptical but whereas HN, Lobsters, etc are mostly baseless opining (mine included) and hot takes, there are discords where they have more signal than the infotainment I enjoy on HN. I’m in a few where people regularly group-read research papers, help each other understand them, etc. I enjoy HN very much, and I still feel uneasy about the ephemeral format of chat, walled gardens and all that, but the content is refreshing.

atlintots• 3 years ago

Any discords you're willing to share?

adamredwoods2• 3 years ago

In my opinion, discord is more "active" social media than "passive". My family uses it to communicate with recent updates, but I don't find it of tremendous value for archival information.

anonzzzies5• 3 years ago

It needs a relatively small community with a strong moderator who will warn people once. Not much of they around as it’s a painful job. I would like just an old fashioned, strict (no endless bickering over politics and wars, just hard tech and show offs what you have been hacking this weekend) forum with most people from r/programminglanguages and some of Hn. That’s enough to keep me entertained anyway.

I very much dislike the discord move; no archive.org / publicly available history. So much interesting and valuable stuff is discussed and a year later they close the channel/topic/even server and gone it is. Worthless.

elliotec• 3 years ago

What part of this is different from HN as it is?

anonzzzies5• 3 years ago

HN is good, but a little too much politics topics for my taste, but yes, not for nothing I am here. I was talking about my ideal (utopia) forum which will never happen. Now I am still on reddit for 3 subs and HN and lobsters.

midoridensha• 3 years ago

Well, for one thing, HN discussions don't just disappear after a while.

lmm3• 3 years ago

Too many HN comments nowadays are a) dumb jokes b) disinformation that it would take too much effort to correct kindly. In the old days those comments were corrected harshly and that kept the community quality high (both because it kept the discussion more accurate at first order, and because it drove away users who couldn't take their lumps). Nowadays they are not corrected at all.

OldGuyInTheClub4• 3 years ago

I don't think of HN as a place to initiate a discussion or ask a question. I've contributed two items which never got any visibility or responses. But, I'm fine with contributing to a thread that makes it to the first few pages if I think I have something to say.

npn2• 3 years ago

HN is a laughing joke now, compare to the old days. For every popular thread there are at least 50% of comments are outright wrong, or unimportant bike-shedding.

To the point some people created a satire website called n-gate some years before just to laugh at HN. And for sure for every top place popular HN thread right now there will be a lot of people posting the link just to laugh at the comments.

photonerd• 3 years ago

HN has its positives, but there’s a good reason it’s derisively known as “the angry orange website” in many tech circles.

sph3• 3 years ago

Not many hackers left round these parts. The Eternal September hit hard.

lost_tourist• 3 years ago

HN isn't pretty much guaranteed to be dead in a year or two and it can also be archived easily.

xbmcuser• 3 years ago

LTT forums I think is quite a good.

https://linustechtips.com/

sourcegrift• 3 years ago

Can we get a lobste.rs invitation chain going please? The discussion on there is usually non-fluff and increasingly higher quality and i'd like to chime in once in a while.

fireattack• 3 years ago

Same here. If anyone can kindly share an invitation, my email address is in my profile.

Edit: got one (two actually), thanks forks!

max_• 3 years ago

Send me an email.

tptacek2• 3 years ago

Mastodon has been pretty great for this stuff for me. Get Ivory and it's basically identical to Twitter.

_hypx3• 3 years ago

Mastodon plus the rest of the Fediverse is a good idea. See a big list of servers here: https://fedidb.org/network

adamredwoods2• 3 years ago

It's a good idea, but it's not clear how to navigate it. Centralized social media is easier to participate and browse.

gumby• 3 years ago

Is there a way to get ivory to treat threads the way twitter does? Right now if someone postsm say, a five post thread I see #5, then #4 ... #1 all as top level posts. Very offputting.

crooked-v• 3 years ago

SomethingAwful is remarkably good, at least as long you stay out of the designated shitpost zones. The combination of monetary buy-in and legacy community does a lot.

wanda• 3 years ago

I'll second that. Though I have rarely logged into it the last ten years, I used to be more active on SA before that.

Lots of people have complained about moderation there but I think it's just a case of avoid the designated spam areas, and don't post nothing.

The latter part is how the HN community tends to self-curate comments anyway.

coding123• 3 years ago

Is Serious Hardware Software Crap still there?

sph3• 3 years ago

I'm not so sure. See, you could say I'm politically on the left, but I've noticed Something Awful is way too radical for my experience of HN and Reddit-style leftism. There is this paradoxical American anti-intellectual air about the site which I didn't notice until using it for a couple years, that turns me off from talking about anything serious.

I know it's a comedy site, but often people and mods get angry because you don't agree to the same "eat the rich" mob mentality.

US politics has ruined the Internet, and I would like that as far away from my software talk. If a place is politicised, I'd rather have good old anarchism which works well with anti-censorship/cryptography discussion and hacker mentality, than anything on both sides of the political spectrum which turn people into mindless followers.

thrdbndndn• 3 years ago

I have the same problem too.

To me, Hacker News has the best demographics for such discussions (more mature, less recurring jokes, and more importantly most of people here are in good faith), BUT discussion type threads are very unpopular here compared to news-based thread: you can barely get any replies.

playingalong• 3 years ago

Maybe it's a sign the folks with HN demographics are not into discussions?

nnurmanov6• 3 years ago

These are the same people (I believe) who discusses post on Reddit or Twitter. I'd rather think that it is because UX, algorithms or other thing which is not related to whether locals are into or not into discussions.

lynx23• 3 years ago

I was never really attracted to web forums, be it StackOverflow or Reddit. I still to this day prefer tech discussions on mailing lists. That is the preferable way of cunsuming that sort of content, for me. I prefer reading/writing in a mail client, and I absolutely hate web browsers made into text editors. I miss the times when you could just subscribe to a list of a particular topic, and have interesting content arrive in your INBOX/folder automatically. No need to regularily go somewhere any check if there is intersting content, and no need to fiddle with RSS either. Just a plain old email account, was enough to get really interesting content delivered.

zer8k• 3 years ago

I don't really and haven't since the death of forums. At a few jobs I found a group of people who were interested in more than just CRUD but inevitably these people leave for greener pastures.

It would be cool to have a place like usenet to discuss these things. I don't want to install a thousand shitware apps, or use 10 different sites, just to talk to people. Was much easier to just cast a post into the ether and wait for replies. Reddit IMO is probably the lowest quality discussion zone and having my posts mined by AI for profit really bothers me.

OldGuyInTheClub4• 3 years ago

I have a few trusted people I can email. If there is something outside their expertise, they will forward my message to others they trust. In exchange I try not to waste their time and never contact their associates separately.

ggm• 3 years ago

This. but slack. Morally the same space. People who understand my neologisms or malapropisms and know how to say "no, that's not an outer left join" nicely without "RTFM" getting too harsh

OldGuyInTheClub4• 3 years ago

It is getting increasingly harder to find TFM these days.

xwdv• 3 years ago

If there was a better place for discussing computer related stuff, I’d be there instead of on hackernews.

That said, we can’t really talk about computers all the time. There’s only so much one can say about computers, therefore it becomes inevitable that we pass the time in between computer topics by discussing other subjects, but always from pro-computer type perspectives. Or even anti-computer perspectives, which are still computer related. The one thing we don’t seem to tolerate here is tech illiterates and magical thinking.

renewiltord2• 3 years ago

Ironically, lobsters is great so long as you ignore every `culture` tag using the filters https://lobste.rs/filters I have the following filtered:

- culture

- rant

- privacy

I think those ones are usually full of people saying the same stuff over and over again.

Karrot_Kream5• 3 years ago

Lobsters is too focused around PLs, systems coding, and FOSS politics for my tastes. The content in other computing niches is just too cursory to be interesting.

renewiltord2• 3 years ago

That is true. I think it's because of the small community. I am working on something with a friend so I can apply similar filtering to HN. HN has a good mass of people and some smart people but it's got a lot of repetitive LLM-style content. Once it is done, I think I shall be happy.

nextlevelwizard• 3 years ago

Love the top comment about discussion being done by "midwits" and then unironically suggesting /g/ as discussion place. This is best trolling I've seen in a while.

endorphine• 3 years ago

I'm surprised noone mentioned IRC (Libera, OFTC).

sph3• 3 years ago

I wouldn't know which channels to hang on on IRC these days. For the past 10 years even populated channels are a ghost town of join and leave notices, and not any discussion.

specproc• 3 years ago

On Reddit and other fora, we have heavy bias towards people that have the time to goof around on forums instead of, you know, doing things.

Burn. I should log and get some work done.

vouaobrasil4• 3 years ago

So where do you go when you want to geek out?

This may be a pessimistic take, but computer stuff I believe has lost the allure that it once had, and here is why I think so:

At one point, computer stuff meant being a hacker, having the hacker ethic, which personally to me translated into figuring out how stuff worked and putting it together to do something useful. And, "something useful" to me meant creating something and showing it off to other people. I still remember in high school when I hacked together a paint program in some interpreted language that had built-in primitive graphics. Computer-related stuff meant also doing good things for the world, like transmitting useful information over the internet and discussing things.

Nowadays, "computer stuff" is a lot different. Yeah, computers have gotten way more powerful, but computer stuff is now 99% about commoditizing and big-tech abstracting everything away into a process that is just about selling junk people don't need and manipulating the basic psychological processes of human beings for the sake of their own growth. It's about behemoth, high-level abstractions that take away the basic joy of learning, and the main philosophy that pervades computers today is that they are a tool to supply sugar-level media consumption in return for commercial engagement.

Companies like Google, Apple, Microsoft, IBM, and others are the result of a late-stage technological development fuelled only by greed, and it's left the computer landscape soulless, metallic, and empty. Unfortunately, people became aware of just how commercializable computers were and we've milked it dry like a cow that needs to be pumped full of drugs to keep going.

So no thanks. I left computer science as my job this year, and while I still enjoy writing a cool algorithm in Python, I'm much happier for it and don't talk about computers any more.

rkagerer2• 3 years ago

I view their failure to put users first as a giant opportunity for someone else to come along and do a better job.

a_bonobo• 3 years ago

I think that's a direct result of the 'weird' way our economy works: we've moved away from customer satisfaction to investor satisfaction.

Nowadays, companies exist to increase their stock value so their managers get bigger bonuses. You don't get more stock by being better to your customers: ruthlessly firing people also increases your stock value. Putting users first might make your company look not worthy of investment: the market selects for stockholder-first companies.

lagniappe• 3 years ago

I'm working on this right now. I miss when the user determined how the data was presented. I'm making a minimal, markdown-based document network similar to gemini or gopher.

samwillis• 3 years ago

This is very much what the local first movement is about: https://localfirstweb.dev/

Give users control of their data and privacy, moving away from large backend infrastructure, and providing better value to the user. With the bonus of having a more enjoyable development environment and an excited community.

itisit• 3 years ago

That’s just it: computing is ordinary and in most cases a commodity. Same as petroleum, wheat, and gold. When business normalizes around a commodity, all the excitement, novelty, and wonder is lost. Consumers demand it, suppliers crank it out. Who cares? Don’t get me wrong. I’m grateful the staples are always there on the proverbial shelf. But am I enthusiastically interested and passionate about that?

Dalewyn• 3 years ago

computer stuff I believe has lost the allure that it once had,

You're quite right, but your subsequent argument can be summed up much more simply: Computing became mainstream.

Mainstream things aren't fun. Mainstream things are mundane.

Companies like Google, Apple, Microsoft, IBM, and others are the result of a late-stage technological development fuelled only by greed,

Besides Google and contemporaries like Amazon, those companies like Microsoft and IBM are the companies who led the way during the Computing == Hacker age that you feel nostalgia for.

Obviously companies can and will change over time, but to mindlessly hand wave them away as "greed" is the epitome of rose-colored glasses.

vouaobrasil4• 3 years ago

You are right in some ways, but I think the situation is a bit more complex than mainstream. Some things do go mainstream, such as protein shakes (at one point, whey was simply discarded), but they don't necessarily lose their enjoyment factor. The point I was trying to make is that not only did computers go mainstream, but they also have certain attributes that make them especially exploitable under the current capitalistic system.

AnthonyMouse2• 3 years ago

Mainstream things aren't fun. Mainstream things are mundane.

Mainstream things are mundane in the way that McDonalds is mundane and yet food as a whole is not.

The real problem is that users have been locked out of their own devices and data to such an extent that you can't easily make your own and share it with your friends, and people are disenchanted with years of eating nothing but Big Macs.

36933• 3 years ago

This is the best take I’ve read about this topic and I don’t think that’s a pessimistic take of you.

What are you doing now, if I may ask?

vouaobrasil4• 3 years ago

Thanks for the comment. After I quit my full-time research job, I became a full-time wildlife photographer and non-fiction writer. It doesn't pay as much but I like it a lot.

Zoo3y• 3 years ago

Agreed, it's possible to still like programming as a hobby despite its commodification in the larger scheme of things. Ycombinator in a nutshell.

epups• 3 years ago

While I understand you, I don't share your pessimism. The golden age you alluded to was elitist. Very few people around the world benefitted from technology, it was a game for privileged and/or rich kids. Now we have literally billions of people talking to each other, banking, working remotely through technology. Sure, it was commoditized, like everything else. But this commoditization helped far more people than any legendary hacker of the 1980s could ever dream of.

nnurmanov6• 3 years ago

I am from enterprise background, where 80-90% of the works is simply supporting the existing infrastructure. Any successful technology after adoption becomes "mundane" as you can't always write code or build new products, you have to support them too.

oska2• 3 years ago

I would call your take 'jaded' rather than pessimistic. And I don't mean to be critical in saying that; it's quite understandable that people get jaded in this industry. But I think there are still very much hacker cultures out there and green shoots still sprouting in not highly visible corners. You have to have the enthusiasm and idealism to go searching for them; both things that we tend to have more of when we are younger. Or you have to have been very careful throughout your career to have only worked in places and on things that you believed in and were enthusiastic about, and thus kept your enthusiasm and idealism alive.

jasonjmcghee2• 3 years ago

I'd be interested to join Lobste.rs- those of you on the platform, how did you go about joining?

runjake• 3 years ago

What’s your email? I’ll send you an invite.

Edit: sent to hi@

coffeemug• 3 years ago

I would appreciate an invite-- I've been looking for a smaller programming-oriented community. My email is in my profile.

kaeruct• 3 years ago

Would you send me an invite as well? Email in profile. Thanks in advance :)

codedeadlock• 3 years ago

Hi - If possible can you send me the invite too? Would really appreciate it. Thanks!

robjan2• 3 years ago

Would really appreciate an invite if you don't mind. My email is hi@[username].com

itherseed• 3 years ago

Hi, I'm interested in an invitation too, would appreciate it. Mail in the profile, thanks in advance.

jasonjmcghee2• 3 years ago

Hey, I really appreciate that. Feel free to email me directly if you'd like to chat, otherwise, I'll see you around the community.

s777• 3 years ago

Hi, I'm also interested in an invitation if you have any left (my email is in my profile)

Karrot_Kream5• 3 years ago

I just join the Matrix rooms and Discords associated with projects I enjoy. People there usually discuss adjacent projects as well and the nature of people coming to discuss the project keeps the chatter deep and focused. One topic I enjoy is networking and distributed systems and for that, the #yggdrasil:matrix.org room is great. It's centered around the Yggdrasil mesh overlay network. The Nix Matrix room is also a great way to learn about systems coding and all sorts of gotchas when it comes to reproducible builds.

LanternLight83• 3 years ago

As an aside, I've been using my device's Ygg addresses to punch NAT instead of opening ports or learning tailscale and it's been a pleasure, thx to everyone who makes thin stuff work

Roark66• 3 years ago

It depends what do you want to discuss. There are lots of subject forums that are still thriving. Arch Linux forum, Debian Linux forum, for Microsoft stuff you have "Microsoft community" (not that I ever used it, but I read it sometimes in ancient past). For vintage computer stuff you have vcfed.org and vogons.org (BTW, I find it hilarious vogons will not show up in Google searches, unless you know it, it doesn't exist). Then you have the youtube comments on channels like ltt etc.

Vespasian• 3 years ago

Offline by meeting people in person.

Not everybody has time for that and you won't get all the information out there, but for me it's been always very enlightening meeting smart and knowledable people for a beer a talk. Usually such discussions don't end in heated debates where everybody walks away miserable, but switch to other unrelated topics or simply end when everything useful is ssaid.

I've had great success with hackerspaces and other off work meetups. Not all night hackathons anymore but just a few people spending a relaxing evening talking about tech and other stuff. If it's informal enough with no expectation of attendance it also works for people with families and other obligations.

swah• 3 years ago

Kinda unrelated but youtube comments still give me the old internet vibe I associate with forums, usenet, etc. I think its the lower quality / lower barrier to participate, to be honest.

Where do you discuss computer related stuff now?

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