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.

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?

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Various discords

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.