The challenge with web3 is that almost nobody is actually using web3 for anything other than doing more web3 speculation. That makes this virtually impossible to find this:
> I’m interested in the tech/practical applications, as opposed to the hype/emotion.
Even the people discussing the potential practical applications aren’t the people who are using it. The people talking about it are the people trying to sell it or speculate on it.
I've studied this for about ten years, and came to the conclusion there is none, other than crazy financial structures and mechanisms that make the 2008 subprime mortgage scandal look like a Fischer-Price toy. If you find an interesting, practical application for anything blockchain or cryptocurrency, please let me know as well.
There are many clever minds here and I have followed by far the most witty discussions on various topics on this platform. Whenever the topic of cryptocurrencies comes up, substantial concerns are expressed about the technology and its added value for society and the financial system.
At the same time, I don't get the sense that this is unfounded reluctance. Rather, fundamental questions reveal themselves upon closer examination. And the participants in the discussion are in best of company. Many smart people have expressed concerns about crypto currencies in the past (e.g. Bjarne Stroustrup or Waren Buffet to name a few).
I have the feeling that the vast majority of cryptocurrency advocates have no idea about the matter themselves. They are simply spreading slogans on Reddit and Twitter proclaiming the next big hype. I think that's one of the reasons why you can find so little neutral and highly qualitative information on the subject - there is none.
“Crypto” in your list is more broad and can also include the Development & Research sub forum of Bitcointalk: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=6.0
Beyond those, find the “Community” sections of the specific projects you care about. They’ll usually have either a forum or a Discord or a Telegram.
However, HN seems to be in large anti-crypto, so I think you will not be exposed here to anything "bleeding edge", more like major news. Also I have not seen any Show HN or similar of people developing applications for the crypto space.
So I have been asking myself the same question as you. There are a lot of websites with great resources for crypto (similar to the regular finance world, the amount of free websites with good information is substantial). There are also some really good substack newsletters (however, some of the writers are invested, so I take their information with a grain of salt).
But there is no forum or similar venue that I know of where actual users or contributors discuss or share experiences (except for some discord servers maybe).
HN isn't going to be that venue at the moment, seems pretty hostile to web3/crypto. That'll change eventually, but for now you gotta look elsewhere.
https://twitter.com/DocumentEther
https://old.reddit.com/r/defi/
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=raoul+pal+ether...
Just code some smart contracts on the testnet after you've absorbed the basics.
I would imagine where Bitcoin started would be one of them, perhaps there's references to other communities there. Sometimes discords are good but still suffer from bad management.
As for HN, the conversations here bring in a lot of folks that have a very low opinion of crypto assets in general, so that makes it harder to have more detailed conversations about the underlying technology.
I don't really want tags or silos. I'm not great at searching the site. Given how often questions exactly like this post show up here, I'm clearly not the only one who wishes they could find HN-like discussion for a specific subject area.
I'm bothering to make this comment in hopes that one of two things will happen:
1. Someone will give me a solution for how to more readily find what I want on HN.
2. Someone will create some kind of tech solution in response to seeing this observation.
1. Decentralized exchanges: Uniswap.org, projectserum.com.
2. Stablecoins, especially USDC. I get paid for my consulting in USD from US to India with a tx fee of $0.00025 on Solana. I'm saving a lot compared to using PP/Payoneer.
3. Supporting artists I love with NFT on foundation/ opensea/magic eden(for some reason I never did this before although there are web2 sites for it).
4. Generate yield on your stable coins. I wont mention apps here since they are new and have some smart contract risks to it, DYOR.
5. Creator monetisation using unlock-protocol.com and mirror.xyz.
6. Play to earn models in games(Axie infinity and Aurory).
7. Internet native experiments on inclusive sybil resistant identities(proofofhumanity.id)
8. Crypto powered infrastructure networks (helium.com)
9. Inflation resistant currency/Digital gold(Bitcoin & lightning network).
10. Censorship resistant social media.
Reddit is fine, but it heavily depends on what you want. r/ethdev is good if you're interested in creating something, and r/ethfinance for quality discussion focused on what you can do on Ethereum.
It's a newsletter blurb-and-link format, but Week In Ethereum is a great resource for keeping up with a lot of what's happening. From the core ethereum development to defi and nft techs to some broader social and legal issues, that newsletter keeps you up to date.
But, twitter isn't just the "HN" of crypto. r/ethereum may be closer to the HN of crypto.
In crypto, Twitter is the town square, the watering hole, the stadium, the newspaper, the social club, and so much more. It's very hard to overstate the importance of twitter to the crypto industry.
I share your quest for finding the HN of "Web3". I've long been on CryptoTwitter but I've decided that I don't want to spent a lot of time on Twitter anymore.
Since then, I've tried to understand where there could be a technical and philosophical community of tech+crypto people on the internet.
- HN is full of haters, sadly
- everything on reddit is slightly too non-technical and hype mentality
- I haven't found a low noise Discord server
- I haven't found a good hacker news clone either.
- CT is too self-important
I don't strictly want to have this totally crypto-biased community either. I'm in the camp of "'yes' to crypto but I'm critical".
For the last year or so, I've simply started to foster my own community. I write a blog on crypto that you may like: https://timdaub.github.io/ My headlines are kinda clickbaity but I think they're legitbait :) Check it!
I'd be up for starting a proper crypto community. I even have reserved a name for it: neoactuary.com. I checked out the lobster code base and I think it'd be a good fit too. But those things take ages to get established: https://github.com/lobsters/lobsters
https://unstoppabledomains.com/search?searchTerm=evilmaid.cr...
Here is a IPFS link to the website. https://abbfe6z95qov3d40hf6j30g7auo7afhp.mypinata.cloud/ipfs...
Using a Web3 browser. https://evilmaid.crypto/
https://www.wired.com/story/theres-no-good-reason-to-trust-b...
(Wired paywall can be circumvented with: https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome)
/r/medicine is also pretty interesting, albeit more diffuse.
You have to be a certain kind of person and a certain kind of commenter to benefit from the kinds of rules and norms we have here. We reward curiosity and heavily penalize single-layer jokes and memes. But unlike heavily moderated subreddits, we also value quality asides and off-topic branches, so long as, again, they reflect curiosity.
Perhaps the biggest blocker to HN-like communities for other fields is we're allowed to be wrong on the internet. And we're allowed to point it out, correct each other, and gratefully accept corrections.
HN & Rationalist groups can accept and integrate new information, and we can accept that some people are misinformed or having a bad day, and that they're not malicious or trolls.
Whereas in most online communities you can be either "right" or you can be gone.
From there, it's a huge number of individual communities centered on different DeFi products on Discord.
The problem with DeFi is that there's a lot of spam and shilling, making it extremely hard to have a more centralized forum like HN.
And it seems Shopify, Stripe and even Cloudflare are all hiring a team on Web3. I dont understand Crypto, NFT or DeFi, but I see DAS as an important piece of puzzle on the web.
People here always say the value of YC is in the network, and that may translate well to a decentralized model.