Honestly, this is the wrong question, but I understand the intent. What you really should be asking is "Where is the online community for your hobby/interest?"
The thing with HN, is it works for the startup/hacker/tech community, and that community has evolved here over time. If you want a link/topic sharing site for other interests, the answer is almost always going to be a subreddit.
But if what you really want is to be immersed in a community, those communities will be in weird corners that you have to discover. The reason for this is that a community almost always wants to be semi-private: discoverable by others that share the same interest, but just far enough out of the public eye to not get bombarded with bots/trolls/obnoxious people
Some examples I know of:
- Voron (3d printer)? You want to be on their discord
- BigGreenEgg (kamado smoker)? eggheadforum.com
- MMA? sherdog
- Electronics/Robotics diy style hacky projects? hackaday and go to the comment secion
The cool part about finding these true pockets of a community, is you can learn a ton about what truly makes them tick. What do they get excited about, what do they have an irrational hatred for, etc. If you've ever asked yourself "how do I market my app/website/saas", it's almost certainly because you haven't yet encountered where that niche community resides, and are falling back to more generic strategies. Find the community, and they'll tell you what they want in spades
And yet I find that my favorite posts & comment threads here are the ones that *aren't* about tech, startups, etc. And I'm always amazed at how no matter what the topic there's always someone who seems to know what they're talking about. Of course there are always many people who think they know what they're talking about :)
Perhaps it's less "Community about X" but rather "Community of people who are interested in X" as there's more likelihood that you'd have other shared interests? Not sure.
Honestly part of the reason I use HN is the UI, and to me it feels less "community" than something like a forum or even reddit.
When I asked the question I was literally imagining hn but say, about art. It's the mix of "keeping up" with news and people sharing interesting tidbits. I find that doesn't happen often in subreddits I follow either, even if they're good communities.
Nice conglomeration of headlines/links from lots of different sources. Lots of tech and science, but also a good mix of global news. Includes HN actually.
I've stopped following pretty much everything except HN. Which is unfortunate (though sorta nice for my mental health), but my interests right now are also narrow.
I'd suggest Lemmy? It still feels small, and has decent activity for self-hosting and homelab stuff after the whole reddit API debacle. That's where I plan to put more effort once I stand up my own ActivityPub server. Id like to try Mastodon again too but I bounced off last time
I used to follow a lot of communities, but many of them have died out over the years for various reasons.
One of the things I've been trying to do recently is to get out and attend local meetups. The resolution and depth of the discussion IRL can be much deeper. And it makes me realize that most people aren't on Hacker News!
Kind of an old gen site and isnt without its issues, but I feel like metafilter gives me a few good links every day still so I keep it around. They are good at spotlighting stuff that is lesser known.
lowtechmagazine if you are interested in very practical sustainability. Their solar powered website (a 1-board computer on somebody's roof in barcelona) has been a recurring HN topic. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20038619
I’ve friends say this but I haven’t figured out how to make it work. It takes so much time to sort and filter and there’s no way to get a proper “feed” without constantly scrolling through crap that’s injected.
I asked a friend to show me and he walked me through their workflow and it boiled down to “spend hours on twitter everyday and some decent percent is manually filtering.”
HN has an easy interface -front page. I can hide things I’ve read and I don’t see them again, or I can leave them to read later. And comments are threaded. Twitter doesn’t seem to have these things.
It's kind of like that one friend who will pontificate on the merits of smoked cinnamon sticks, bitters, candied pecans, and the $10,000 worth of liquor in their living room bar - they've fooled themselves into thinking they're <drinking/using twitter> responsibly and nobly, but it's really just a bunch of mental gymnastics to justify doing <unhealthy thing which feels good>.
How do you generally find subreddits? I used love forums instead of subreddits. Subreddits seem to have very shallow conversations and does not have decent explanations.
which is less focused, more about everything (god I wish I could frontpage an article about sports on HN) but has a much higher ratio of discussions to links (e.g. Ask HN is a joke)
Do you mind sending me one? I understand if not since I've been lurking more than I've been commenting, but I really value online forums like HN which don't seem to suffer (as much) from the issues that plague, for example, Reddit, and I'd appreciate it :D
Anyone who wants one should look up my profile and send me an email. I have three right now and they will go to whoever sends me the first three emails. I will get around to it this evening.
https://www.bogleheads.org/ is somewhat similar in terms of active discussion for investing and personal finance. Unfortunately, it’s in a forum format so threaded discussion is a bit difficult.
Not sure if you can really find something like HN for other topics. HN works as it works exactly because of the topic and audience. Same structure might not work for other things
I am making digglu.com, which is supposed to be old-digg-like link aggregator site. I would have it out by now if only I could stop procrastinating T_T
Do you know where to look to get an invite? I really enjoy the high-level discussion and I want to do more than lurk but its a tough nut to crack, it seems.
I'm torn between two sides when thinking about lobste.rs
On one side they have imho high quality content. But on the other side they can keep this just because their registration is invite-only.
Which leads to fewer/smaller discussions.
On HN I don't like everything, but I read a lot more discussions even about topics which I'm not interested in.
I liked lobste.rs but found they were too restrictive on topics.
I kind of like the hacker-adjacent discussions here (notebooks and journaling and reading and whatnot) and lobste.rs seems to block and remove that and there’s no outlet for that type of discussion.
I like they HN, for me, is 80% tech/startup/programming, 10% adjacent and interesting and 10% stuff I just go past.
https://sciurls.com/
https://mathurls.com/
https://techurls.com/
https://finurls.com/
https://physurls.com/
https://devurls.com/
https://hwurls.com/
https://tuxurls.com/