Where do you discuss computer related stuff now?(lobste.rs)
lobste.rs
Where do you discuss computer related stuff now?
https://lobste.rs/s/ih3cwj/where_do_you_discuss_computer_related
133 comments
LTT forums I think is quite a good.
https://linustechtips.com/
https://linustechtips.com/
What part of this is different from HN as it is?
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.
HN isn't a good place for discussion in my opinion due to the (explicitly allowed) practice of downvoting comments you don't agree with.
If you'll be penalized for saying something people disagree with, you won't say it, or you'll say it and I'll be downvoted until it's hidden. This leads to HN threads usually being dominated with a few majority opinions and any real discussion being killed-off or buried.
This is basically the same as Reddit. If you want real discussion you often need to sort by controversial.
If you'll be penalized for saying something people disagree with, you won't say it, or you'll say it and I'll be downvoted until it's hidden. This leads to HN threads usually being dominated with a few majority opinions and any real discussion being killed-off or buried.
This is basically the same as Reddit. If you want real discussion you often need to sort by controversial.
I'm still coming up to speed on downvoting. The down arrows appeared for me suddenly a couple of weeks ago but not for every post.
At least for now I find them useful. I have read a lot of grayed posts to get a feeling for what's going on and usually see why. I've upvoted a few where I thought the author was on point.
At least for now I find them useful. I have read a lot of grayed posts to get a feeling for what's going on and usually see why. I've upvoted a few where I thought the author was on point.
> The down arrows appeared for me suddenly a couple of weeks ago but not for every post.
I believe you get access to downvotes after 500 karma, and only for up to a day after the comment was made
I believe you get access to downvotes after 500 karma, and only for up to a day after the comment was made
One quirk about HN is that if you complain about the downvotes, you'll get even more. The community does seem to treat karma as the truly imaginary internet points they are.
Descendance into the underworld occurs when the goal becomes to embrace the highest negative score as it will put the comment at the bottom extreme of the thread and neither get lost in the middle nor marked at the top of the groupthink. If down votes were to serve the purpose of hiding less useful comments, then it would be more appropriate to style the comments with colors associated with a light/dark theme and not mess with chronological order, but that would likely set off the anti-gay crowd. As an aside, the temperature is more constant further from searing gazes. Just don't get flagged as that calls the terminator hounds.
Complaining about voting is explicitly against the community guidelines
IMO, HN they should introduce tags and include them to range the visibility. This way we could have more visibility for specific areas.
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.
Are you ok to share those 3 subs on reddit?
Sure
- r/programminglanguages - r/lisp - r/functionalprogramming
- r/programminglanguages - r/lisp - r/functionalprogramming
The issue with lobsters is the difficulty of joining it, which I suppose is a feature.
HN has its positives, but there’s a good reason it’s derisively known as “the angry orange website” in many tech circles.
What do you think the anonymity makes the locals' angrier? While anonymity can encourage people to provide honest feedback, I also had an experience where I received negative feedback for nothing:)
Not many hackers left round these parts. The Eternal September hit hard.
Well, for one thing, HN discussions don't just disappear after a while.
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.
This is the problem with voting based social media. A demographic can be entirely supplanted by another really quickly. All you need is for the new demographic to upvote themselves, and the pre-existing demographic to not downvote the other demographic. Pre-existing users will start leaving when they see the content they originally came there for being outcompeted by the content the new demographic has introduced, causing a domino effect.
I've seen this happen with multiple subreddits. HN is also at risk for this, but it's a niche corner of the internet, so it would surprise me if there are ever enough non-assimilated individuals coming in at once to truly endanger the community.
I've seen this happen with multiple subreddits. HN is also at risk for this, but it's a niche corner of the internet, so it would surprise me if there are ever enough non-assimilated individuals coming in at once to truly endanger the community.
I would start by not allowing voting on main topics; only allow on comments. And rank topics based on comment votes. Bad comments are going to be downvotes or, if bad quality, will just be removed.
Tildes may be an interesting testing ground as a forum without downvote. It has Labels instead for marking less constructive comments, like Joke, Noise, Malice, etc.
Tildes does not rank based on voting, and instead displays votes as a separate signal. IMO it's a great piece of UX. It gives the author the pleasure of imaginary internet points but doesn't allow highly online mobs to sway the ordering of discussion.
There's a part we can all play here and that is to downvote no-effort/low-value comments. I do that and occasionally explicitly respond to people asking them to refer to the HN guidelines and not turn HN into Slashdot. Jokes (with no other content), sarcasm and the like should all get downvoted. Thoughtful/high-effort comments should be upvoted.
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.
dang has a different style than pg did but I really don't think that's the issue. The site is big now and has absorbed a lot of people fleeing Reddit and Twitter and they've brought that culture with them. dang's moderation has continuously been evenhanded and well applied. The site has changed despite his efforts, IMO.
I hope this doesn't sound like 'sucking up' because it's certainly not intended to be that, but I have been continually impressed at how good a moderator dang is. And more than moderation, he also 'curates' the site well, often adding links to when the subject or even the same article has been discussed before, etc.
But moderation of a popular forum is a Sisyphean task, and worse, it seems that gravity increases over time in this form of the task, making rolling the ball up the hill increasingly hard and not just endless. That sounds bleak but I think the solution is that eventually all forums must be abandoned, however good they once were, and new places found. I expect this to happen with HN eventually too, even though it's had a pretty good run so far.
But moderation of a popular forum is a Sisyphean task, and worse, it seems that gravity increases over time in this form of the task, making rolling the ball up the hill increasingly hard and not just endless. That sounds bleak but I think the solution is that eventually all forums must be abandoned, however good they once were, and new places found. I expect this to happen with HN eventually too, even though it's had a pretty good run so far.
I don't think one can easily compare HN to other forums, so saying the results are predictable is a bit harsh.
I have been in many irc channels that were extremely harsh on cluebies, but all the flaming turned into a sport by itself, and drove away from the content. The same goes for usenet, many subreddits, and Twitter.
I think HN is doing amazingly well after such a long time. It would be guesswork to say how it would end up with a less kind moderator. I for one would have left, but perhaps I'm too kind.
It is annoying that people spread misinformation, but a quick scan of a user's comment history often gives a good indication of their credibility.
I have been in many irc channels that were extremely harsh on cluebies, but all the flaming turned into a sport by itself, and drove away from the content. The same goes for usenet, many subreddits, and Twitter.
I think HN is doing amazingly well after such a long time. It would be guesswork to say how it would end up with a less kind moderator. I for one would have left, but perhaps I'm too kind.
It is annoying that people spread misinformation, but a quick scan of a user's comment history often gives a good indication of their credibility.
> I don't think one can easily compare HN to other forums, so saying the results are predictable is a bit harsh.
Well, I predicted them at the time (and IIRC commented as much), and that's been borne out.
> I have been in many irc channels that were extremely harsh on cluebies, but all the flaming turned into a sport by itself, and drove away from the content. The same goes for usenet, many subreddits, and Twitter.
You can definitely go too far. Kind is better than harsh all else being equal, and you should never reward cruelty for its own sake.
> I think HN is doing amazingly well after such a long time. It would be guesswork to say how it would end up with a less kind moderator. I for one would have left, but perhaps I'm too kind.
For me HN inherited an amazing community that has since gradually declined, and almost all visible moderator interventions have had a negative impact. I certainly think e.g. nudging out Chris Stucchio did more harm than good.
Well, I predicted them at the time (and IIRC commented as much), and that's been borne out.
> I have been in many irc channels that were extremely harsh on cluebies, but all the flaming turned into a sport by itself, and drove away from the content. The same goes for usenet, many subreddits, and Twitter.
You can definitely go too far. Kind is better than harsh all else being equal, and you should never reward cruelty for its own sake.
> I think HN is doing amazingly well after such a long time. It would be guesswork to say how it would end up with a less kind moderator. I for one would have left, but perhaps I'm too kind.
For me HN inherited an amazing community that has since gradually declined, and almost all visible moderator interventions have had a negative impact. I certainly think e.g. nudging out Chris Stucchio did more harm than good.
Add the third type please:
finding any reasons to contradict to parent commentor and win the arguments at any costs.
finding any reasons to contradict to parent commentor and win the arguments at any costs.
Nice observation. I also noticed that the quality went downhill when HN applied strict moderation.
Sure this place looks friendlier now, but it feels empty as most competent people had already left.
Sure this place looks friendlier now, but it feels empty as most competent people had already left.
Not sure if it will ever be possible to moderate content as it was in the past. Time to generate content has become way faster and cheaper.
HN isn't pretty much guaranteed to be dead in a year or two and it can also be archived easily.
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.
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.
Even n-gate apparently found it too hard or painful to keep up with everything on HN.
http://n-gate.com/hackernews/
http://n-gate.com/hackernews/
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?
/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?
>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.
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.
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.
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.
Mastodon has been pretty great for this stuff for me. Get Ivory and it's basically identical to Twitter.
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.
Mastodon plus the rest of the Fediverse is a good idea. See a big list of servers here: https://fedidb.org/network
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.
So what you're saying is that it basically acts like the old Internet, where the requirement of being able to read instructions acted as a filter against stupidity?
Are there any good guides to learning it?
This might be a useful starting point: https://jointhefediverse.net/learn
Centralized social media is the reason why we're in the mess we're in right now. Eventually, someone will come up with an effective way to navigate decentralized social media. It will likely mirror what Google did for Web 1.0.
All federated systems will be centralized.
Once you get a way to navigate federated things, the navigation becomes the core of the experience.
The crux of the internet experience is that Quantity is a quality in itself. Once the navigation window becomes core, and handles the highest volumes, it’s easier to streamline monetary rewards to a single place.
Federated communities that work better with whatever navigator/window/Tool is created do well, and will have more resources to expand and gain users.
Once you get a way to navigate federated things, the navigation becomes the core of the experience.
The crux of the internet experience is that Quantity is a quality in itself. Once the navigation window becomes core, and handles the highest volumes, it’s easier to streamline monetary rewards to a single place.
Federated communities that work better with whatever navigator/window/Tool is created do well, and will have more resources to expand and gain users.
You can replace the centralized navigation system in a federated system if it becomes necessary. But that is not possible in a centralized social media system. Everything is permanently centralized in that system.
I know there's a lot of other opinions here about the benefits of decentralized social media or whatever, but: I don't perceive a difference. I installed Ivory, and I use Mastodon just like Twitter. The only difference to me is that the handles have domain names in them --- they're a little longer. That's it. I don't think about "federation" and "decentralization" at all.
deadalus(3)
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.
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
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.
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.
Maybe it's a sign the folks with HN demographics are not into discussions?
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.
HN is designed to encourage news over discussions. PG thought free discussion would encourage "blogging" and low quality content.
Which is why the text of those posts is pre-faded, so the longer they are, the more painful they are to read, and the less likely they are to be engaged with. News posts also get more visibility than text posts.
Which is why the text of those posts is pre-faded, so the longer they are, the more painful they are to read, and the less likely they are to be engaged with. News posts also get more visibility than text posts.
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.
> 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.
Burn. I should log and get some work done.
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.
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.
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.
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
It is getting increasingly harder to find TFM these days.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I'm surprised noone mentioned IRC (Libera, OFTC).
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
I view their failure to put users first as a giant opportunity for someone else to come along and do a better job.
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.
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.
> I think that's a direct result of the 'weird' way our economy works: we've moved away from customer satisfaction to investor satisfaction.
A lot of this was a consequence of low interest rates. Money didn't come from selling things to customers, it came from selling a story to investors. Now that interest rates are finally above zero it's harder to raise money from investors and businesses will start to remember what it's like to make money from satisfying customers.
And the incumbents who don't realize this may be in for a surprise. What do you do when your business strategy is based on buying up the competition with cheap money and then the cheap money dries up and the competition is willing to sacrifice margins or disavow customer-hostile misfeatures in order to get your market share?
A lot of this was a consequence of low interest rates. Money didn't come from selling things to customers, it came from selling a story to investors. Now that interest rates are finally above zero it's harder to raise money from investors and businesses will start to remember what it's like to make money from satisfying customers.
And the incumbents who don't realize this may be in for a surprise. What do you do when your business strategy is based on buying up the competition with cheap money and then the cheap money dries up and the competition is willing to sacrifice margins or disavow customer-hostile misfeatures in order to get your market share?
That is an insightful point, and all too true. And it's not just investor satisfaction, but the satisfaction of short-term investors due to the peculiarities of modern derivative trading which emphasizes short-term gains through extremely complex financial abstractions.
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.
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.
I never left... still creating desktop applications in my spare time :-).
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
Agreed, it's possible to still like programming as a hobby despite its commodification in the larger scheme of things. Ycombinator in a nutshell.
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?
What are you doing now, if I may ask?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Is Serious Hardware Software Crap still there?
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.
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For myself: Discord groups in my Sim (racing+flight) communities.
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.
- culture
- rant
- privacy
I think those ones are usually full of people saying the same stuff over and over again.
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.
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.
Let me know when you have something going. I'd be interested.
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!
Edit: got one (two actually), thanks forks!
Send me an email.
I'd be interested to join Lobste.rs- those of you on the platform, how did you go about joining?
What’s your email? I’ll send you an invite.
Edit: sent to hi@
Edit: sent to hi@
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.
I would appreciate an invite-- I've been looking for a smaller programming-oriented community. My email is in my profile.
Hi, I'm also interested in an invitation if you have any left (my email is in my profile)
Hi, I'm interested in an invitation too, would appreciate it. Mail in the profile, thanks in advance.
Would really appreciate an invite if you don't mind. My email is hi@[username].com
Hi - If possible can you send me the invite too? Would really appreciate it. Thanks!
Would you send me an invite as well? Email in profile. Thanks in advance :)
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 the content is refreshing.
Any discords you're willing to share?
Karpathy's Zero to Hero Discord is super friendly. Yannic Kilcher's is also cool and seems more active. I like the paper discussions, but it also has more meme-tier antics. This computer vision one is decent: https://discord.gg/MqbXfSG2Wm
I tried joining the Zero to Hero Discord as I love Karpathy's style and vibe, but I couldn't find a way to get in (found expired invites only). Do you by any chance know how to get in?
Here you go https://discord.gg/ftNamTsq
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Thank you! I was still unable to join with that link, so maybe they closed it off or something.
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.
Any suggestions?
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.
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.