Are there any good discussion forums left?

Question

When most people think of a forum, they probably think of Reddit. But Reddit is a news aggregation site, not a discussion forum. It is constantly pushing new content, old content is not meant to be consumed, and it is also not meant for meaningful discussion. This is reflected in the awful search feature, upvotes, etc.A kind of site that was probably well known to most in the early 2000s and later was the forum. Threads could go on for years, and responses could be incredibly in depth.Are there any active sites like that today?

BJBBB · Accepted Answer

HN is one of my most beloved sites. It also infuriates me; and this is not a bad thing. I do not mind the down-vote if the reason is apolitical and explained. [aside note: Gackle and Bell are interesting - they are worth 15 or 20 min looking at DDG links.] And 'Dang' responses seem to be sincere at their attempts to keep HN a viable and reasonable site for techies. While I think that a few of their responses border on hilariously ridiculous, they seem to be earnest.
My answer to your question is, other than HN, probably nothing else is reasonable.
While HN is mostly by and for coding peoples, it oft provides interesting discussions of engineering, science, and society. My remaining favorite discussion forums are densely technical and increasingly narrow in scope, so would not meet your requirements.

ThePhysicist · Answer

There are still some community forums that have withstood commercialization and that are run by passionate enthusiasts. I'm mostly active in German forums and I can think of sites like mikrocontroller.net (micro-electronics related discussions), kaffee-netz.de (coffee, espresso related discussions) and aquariumforum.de (aquarium-related discussions). I'd imagine there are tons of such forums in other areas and in the US as well.

soheil · Answer

https://bitcointalk.org/A lot of car forums survived redditification, probably because those communities are run by car enthusiasts who passionately care about every detail and would never surrender control to a benevolent central authority just so that they don't have to do slightly more work maintaining the site than they otherwise would have.Search for almost any popular sports car and you're sure to find extremely popular forums that date back to either the early days of the internet or when the manufacturer started production.

Gustomaximus · Answer

In Australia we have Whirlpool: https://forums.whirlpool.net.au/
I do wonder if there is value in having basic interfaces. This combined with tech focus seem to have created 2 of the better discussions/information sites IMO (whirlpool and HN).
While a bit more domain specific, webmaster world used to be good, still might be but I haven't been visiting for a couple of years: https://www.webmasterworld.com/

codingclaws · Answer

https://www.peachesnstink.com- I am the creator.- It is a link aggregation site like Reddit and HN, but the link field is optional.- Threads are never closed.- No front-end JavaScript.- No voting.- There are actually no admins or moderators. Instead we show nothing by default and users must whitelist other users.- Open source: https://github.com/ferg1e/peaches-n-stink- This probably sounds like a crazy site but it appears to be working and I've had some nice convos with some of the users.

marto1 · Answer

You're staring at one right now :-)

drstewart · Answer

Something Awful is still active, though your mileage may vary as far as "good" goes.

admissionsguy · Answer

A few, e.g. PhysicsForums.com, but they are all waning and it's quite sad.

fotad · Answer

https://nabble.com/Lots of open source project use it as web ui for mailing list