Is there anywhere as intellectually curious as kuro5hin used to be?

It's a different time, the net world changed forever after AOL got the "masses" on-line.

slashdot, kuro5hin, usenet, a few other choice places, all either gone, or polluted by willfully ignorant voices.

Or outright mean spirited, aggressive trolls, like Rusty of kuro5hin found out the hard way, poor guy.

You may find Metafilter of interest.

I'd be interested in other places as well, I never found a replacement for those lost treasures of the early net.

I still have my tattered original kuro5hin T-shirt, can't wear it, but can't bear to throw it out.

For anyone with historical interest, here's that last HN post by kuro5hin's owner: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11609308

> Hey so this is Rusty -- What happened was basically that Internap shut down the data center we were in and had to move the servers, and I conspicuously failed to Deal With Things around that. The content is probably not gone foreve

I guess the requirement is that it can't take itself too seriously. People can discuss what they like. Nobody is trying to hunt down people with an unpopular, sincere opinion.

I've seen a friend share something from a space colonization site - what an absurd idea, but also fun and interesting. Too bad I didn't keep the link.

Some of the old forums are still good. Something Awful is still up there, still a little funny, still a little interesting, but feels a little stale. Bay12 (Dwarf Fortress) forums are good, but have become really tight knit that it's might feel a little clique-ish. Still a good place to discuss those kinds of games. I'd bet the Paradox games forums are good too. There's some erotic RP forums which I won't link, but those usually are good places because they attract a lot of Asperger's people who are educated, good at writing, mature enough to discussing anything at all, and it's very tightly moderated.

Oh man I used to post on there, but I'm not sure I'd call it unusually intellectually curious.... but hey why not.

I think one issue with any high-signal commenting platform is there's has to be some sort of standard minimum threshold and investment of emotional/intellectual effort/funds/time to apply. This reduces the tendency for destructive behaviors and low-signal convos.

I could remember reading kuro5hin. Before that we had usenet. I think back then when it was only tech savy people, everyone followed an implicit code of conduct.

Private chat groups are the only place I see now that are like that.

There isn't any that I knew of.

http://kr5ddit.com/ tried to do it but went down as Alpha Racks went dark. Now it is a chat forum.

Not sure how Kuro5hin was, but tildes.net may be something of interest.

I have 10 invites available right now, and I am not affiliated with them — just enjoy the discussions and community that are growing.