Alternatives to HN for non-Hacker News?

FYI I'm about 5 days away from launching Hystoria, a link aggregator limited to items >5 years old.

Idea is to beat hysteria with history. I contend that an unrelenting focus on "breaking" news and hot-takes is what is behind so much of the craziness in today's discourse. So I hope putting a constraint to block that stuff from discussions from the get-go may result in a kinder, more polite, more thoughtful, and intellectually curious kind of community like HN. Or not. It's an experiment.

More on launch post: https://100millionbooks.org/blog/news/introducing-hystoria/

There is no seed content yet and there's a broken link on the header. But feel free to sign up and post! I'm only posting this now because this thread seems highly relevant and it's HN so slightly broken/hacky stuff isn't so taboo :)

https://hystoria.100millionbooks.org/

I am also interested in this... I used to like Reddit a lot, but I feel their push to reach a broader audience has pushed down the quality of the front-page subs. It is dominated by a sense of moral superiority: "Am I the Asshole", "Justice Served", Leopards ate my Face" are very common now.

I like Quora because of specific authors that write high-quality answers (mainly mathematics).

Well, there is (quotes taken from Wikipedia):

LessWrong [1] - a "community blog and forum focused on discussion of cognitive biases, philosophy, psychology, economics, rationality, and artificial intelligence, among other topics."

SlateStarCodex [2] - "a long-form blog written by a San Francisco Bay Area psychiatrist known by the partial pseudonym Scott Alexander. The blog is focused on science, medicine (especially within psychiatry), philosophy, politics, and futurism." ATTENTION: Currently on hiatus and only some of the content available.

Datatau [3] - made the round on HN some time ago as a "fork" of HN for data science topics. Discussion, however, seems to be non-existent.

[1] https://www.lesswrong.com/

[2] https://slatestarcodex.com/

[3] https://datatau.net/

You might like this: https://gurlic.com

More about it in my comment history...

To put an interesting spin on this question for those considering it:

"What other online communities maintain high standards using the dedicated effort of tool-assisted human moderators?"

MetaFilter and RPG.net are two good examples of this.

Reddit as a whole is not — though individual specific groups may choose to apply a more strict hand and are invaluable for it.

I miss webrings, and discovering small communities through them.

The Somethingawful Forums have been a great example of how to run a community for over 20 years. There's a subforum for pretty much everything. That being said, it's absolutely not for everybody and it can be immensely difficult to figure out the culture and how to fit into it.

I wouldn't have my job, house or partner if it weren't for them though!

At least a third of the items on HN are not hacker news, such as this on the front page now: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25317896

Skyscrapercity.com for architecture, construction, urban issues etc. One of my favs, mainly because it's a old school forum so no upvoting/downvoting, no algorithms and no teenagers. Quality may be varied though - depends of which regional subforum you are browsing.

Reddit - geopolitics, philosophy, printSF. Avoid main subreddits and use multireddits feature to connect similar subreddits into one feed.

slowernews.com

For sales-related topics: https://community.lostbookofsales.com

Sales professionals and technologists are welcome. Just launched this with Discourse on a DO droplet.

On Reddit I would recommend r/ModeratePolitics or r/Centrist or r/NeutralPolitics or r/NeutralNews for more balanced, nuanced, and civil (non-hostile) discussions.

I think https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/ is pretty interesting

https://freepo.st/ focuses on free culture

I’ve been noodling on a variation for holistic fitness.

Metafilter is the one that comes immediately to mind. Their one-time $5 sign-up fee and long history of high standards keep out casual trolls and low-quality comments.

The covid19 research subreddit is quite good: www.reddit.com/r/covid19/

hopefully lemmy.ml will be like that in the future

On Reddit, some tightly-moderated forums with high standards are /r/AskHistorians and /r/econmonitor. I like hanging on on tildes.net which also has good moderation, but it doesn't have any particular specialty.

Reddit.