To answer my own question, I've found voat.co to be a good alternative to reddit. The community is small, but the content is about as great as HN or some good quality sub-reddits.
Ask HN: What are other minimal, all-content, no-frills discussion sites like HN?
71–80 of 93 posts
Re: Ask HN: What are other minimal, all-content, no-frills discussion sites like HN?
#72Re: Ask HN: What are other minimal, all-content, no-frills discussion sites like HN?
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
I just visited and the top post this month is http://www.metafilter.com/163757/Emotions-are-Work , which was the most anti-male comments I've been exposed to in a while. The name meta filter implies to me this site wanted to be somewhat neutral and open-ended, but my impression so far is it's become dominated by SJW types, which is going to make it unreadable by me.
MF is a pay-to-post site, so it is skewed towards people who will pay. It's the same as those small elite colleges where people will study something impractical for an exhorbitant fee. You would only pay if you agreed with whatever the orthodoxy is. And it becomes self-selecting, and self-perpetuating. The people on MF are the sort of people who would say "OMG I can't believe anyone voted for Trump, because nobody I…
MF has a one-time sign-up fee of $5.[0] It's a method of making it less likely that people create fake accounts and for members to value their accounts more. There are some people for whom this fee is beyond what they can pay. For many people, it's a cup of coffee or two, or a beer at a local bar. Yes, it has a gating effect. It'd be interesting to do a more formal study to compare the discussions there with other sites, such as HN, lobste.rs (invite-only), or Reddit.
Re: Ask HN: What are other minimal, all-content, no-frills discussion sites like HN?
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
If people haven't tried looking for smaller subreddits or more controlled subreddits then I'd highly encourage them to. Reddit may have a huge amount of low effort content and frankly highly disturbing content, but some of the subreddits are absolutely fantastic. I'm not really into history but https://reddit.com/r/askhistorians is a treasure trove of fascinating information, with well sourced and detailed answers to…
I don't know about the quality of moderation in r/AskHistorians however. I read a recent answer there whose first sentence was the opposite of reality. Thinking of how I could demonstrate this easily and effectively, where any person could follow up easily and see what's right, I posted a comment saying it contradicted the second sentence of the Wikipedia article on the topic. My comment was automatically banned by t…
> My comment was automatically banned by the auto-moderator because it had a link to Wikipedia and no other links. I tried reading the subreddit rules before posting, but it's pretty hard to find this rule -- indeed, it is not explicitly stated as far as I can tell.
It is at least currently in the subreddit rules page, as linked to on the main site.
"Wikipedia, or any other single tertiary resource, used by itself not a suitable basis for a comment in this subreddit."
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/rules
In general on reddit, if you've had a comment removed and think it's not right then message the moderators.
Re: Ask HN: What are other minimal, all-content, no-frills discussion sites like HN?
#75Re: Ask HN: What are other minimal, all-content, no-frills discussion sites like HN?
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't know about the quality of moderation in r/AskHistorians however. I read a recent answer there whose first sentence was the opposite of reality. Thinking of how I could demonstrate this easily and effectively, where any person could follow up easily and see what's right, I posted a comment saying it contradicted the second sentence of the Wikipedia article on the topic. My comment was automatically banned by t…
> My comment was automatically banned by the auto-moderator because it had a link to Wikipedia and no other links. I tried reading the subreddit rules before posting, but it's pretty hard to find this rule -- indeed, it is not explicitly stated as far as I can tell. It is at least currently in the subreddit rules page, as linked to on the main site. "Wikipedia, or any other single tertiary resource, used by itself no…
The comment I was responding to was written by a moderator, who saw my comment and edited their comment to hedge their incorrect claim. They messaged me but my comment was not reinstated.
I don't think that a subreddit that bans links to Wikipedia can be considered a good source of information.
Re: Ask HN: What are other minimal, all-content, no-frills discussion sites like HN?
#77I've always thought that a simple HN-like site directed at those of us interested in art, critical theory and literature would be wonderful. Does anybody know of one? I would be interested in helping set one up... One of the difficulties is that artists and academics tend to be very protective of interesting sources as I think intellectual individuality is much more of a currency than in the tech world.
I would be interested in this. I come from an art background and many people use aldaily.com to get a sort of curated collection of articles. But adding the voting from HN would be interesting. That said, you are right that academics are protective. Much of what they are actually interested in is pay-walled as well.
Thanks for the aldaily heads-up! Going on my bookmarks. If you don't already know it, http://conversations.e-flux.com/ is also a pretty decent semi-curated list.
In terms of setting one up, lobste.rs is open source (https://github.com/jcs/lobsters) and could be a good candidate for a starting point...
Re: Ask HN: What are other minimal, all-content, no-frills discussion sites like HN?
#78Pick a topic, find the subreddit for it. If you don't like the vibe there, make your own subreddit and moderate it -- or offer to help mod the primary and let them know it's because you want to change the vibe -- lots of mods really don't have the time to do a great job. Go advertise your "just like /r/floobinart but with more zimbledings" sub everywhere to get people to come to it.
Haha are you a Rick and Morty writer?
Re: Ask HN: What are other minimal, all-content, no-frills discussion sites like HN?
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
How about the first sentence, "Women are expected to regulate the emotions of men as well as themselves." And the first comment, "Anyhow — men who don’t understand their entire emotional range are prone to anger because they can’t meet their own needs." And the 2nd comment, "I also wonder if that guy wonders if his girlfriends ever had to hire sex workers to manage their emotional needs before they met him." I don't…
What exactly do you object to in any of those three sentences as being sexist? I don't understand what anti-male means to you.
You must be trolling. The entire thread is women finding reasons in everything but themselves at all the possible plights in real life.
Also the idea that women are emotionally regulating 2 people in most relationships is such nonsense that it doesn't even deserve discussion.
Re: Ask HN: What are other minimal, all-content, no-frills discussion sites like HN?
#80Honestly if you can find some good communities on Slack those are usually great. Unfortunately I don't have any recommendations as I only have private slack teams but if anyone has recommendations that are popular that would be pretty awesome. A hacker news team would be fantastic!
How could anybody find a community on Slack? Are they listed somewhere?
I've seen them posted online. But it would be pretty interesting if there were a way to discover public teams.