41–50 of 134 posts
Various discords
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…
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.
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.
Same here. If anyone can kindly share an invitation, my email address is in my profile. Edit: got one (two actually), thanks forks!
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.
Mastodon has been pretty great for this stuff for me. Get Ivory and it's basically identical to Twitter.
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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?
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.
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What part of this is different from HN as it is?
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.
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Yes, there are more reddit like comments now. Moderating is a really hard job when sites are very active.
I don't think it's an activity level issue. When dang took over he made an explicit shift to prioritizing kindness, with predictable results.
Mastodon has been pretty great for this stuff for me. Get Ivory and it's basically identical to Twitter.
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no, it is the very idea of a federated system. The principal benefit of a federation is freedom of assembly and movement. Communities can moderate how they see fit, be much more opinionated, and people who don't like it have the ability to leave.
If all you want is free speech the ideal technical solution is a centralized firehose. The entire point of running your own instance is that you have the ability to control who is in or out and what gets broadcasted. Otherwise we could save ourselves the complexity.
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It's a good idea, but it's not clear how to navigate it. Centralized social media is easier to participate and browse.
I agree, and I used to hold that against the fediverse, but now I kinda consider it a feature and not a bug. It's not hard to use, it's just a learning curve. Once you've learned it, it's very straightforward. So far in my experience, this has lead to an overall higher quality in posting and a general decrease in spam, because the people there are those who were willing to put in the effort of learning it.