Where are the interesting conversations?

I'm curious why you think this sort of conversation would only happen between wealthy people.

The other aspect to consider is that to have deep conversations, you essentially need 95% reading 5% actual discussing because the depth can be pretty high on most topics.

To give a practical example: you can have a deep and touchy convo about the place of religion in life, but in all likelihood every argument you will come up with will have already been written about in far more depth elsewhere. By the very nature of the medium and its history you are only going to have the illusion of depth if you only seek to have conversations as you are describing.

It would also be a good idea to carefully consider what you consider touchy. Chances are, it's just normal things to think about for your demographic. For instance, HN readers like to talk about controlling the masses, large future trends, and revel in the forbidden aspect of discussing this sort of thing. But in reality, population control and an 'architect' view of their place in the world has been a normal feature of the well-to-do classes for pretty much forever.

You do it in person, with people you trust and respect. It's always been this way, even during the heyday of the free internet.

People like to look back with rose tinted glasses at the "good old days" of free expression online, but choose to forget that such conversations with strangers inevitably led to misunderstandings and bad faith assumptions, degenerating into smug superiority fests at best or flame wars at worst.

I post occasionally on HN because it's a lot better than other places I've posted to in the past (Usenet, Slashdot, Reddit etc), but even this is but a pale shadow of the conversations I have in person over drinks.

Campfires or similar events, ideally lubricated with limited amounts of alcohol, possibly a pipe or cigar depending on wind, going late into the night on evenings when nobody has anything in particular early the next morning. In the winter or smoke season, the same thing can be done indoors, but it's better outside, IMO.

It's a far wider, more interesting range of discussions at one of those events than I've found on the internet, and I'm trying to figure out ways to have them more frequently as opposed to the once or twice a month that's been standard for the past few years in my social circles.

There are some shadows of that in some Signal groups and Matrix rooms on private homeservers, but mostly those are spawning things to discuss next time we get together in person.

I don't know anyone who "posts a full range of their thoughts" online anymore, except in fairly well secured private encrypted chat locations, because of just how toxic the whole place has become.

There's one niche place which has a unique "feel" that I haven't experienced anywhere else - on HN, Reddit or Twitter.

It's a blog section on a non-English website about Linux, but the blogs are about anything - current events, niche engineering topics, etc. The discussions are threaded, with no comment voting. It seems like people there have much more distinct and varied personalities compared to HN or Reddit, where comments sometimes seem like written by a single person. The quality has degraded over time though.

We should probably thank the OP for reserving themselves and be grateful that they have not been seduced by their lower urges, where merely giving in to them would cause vaguely illigitimate and shameful outcomes like yacht usage and being sought out for investment advice. ;)

Public discourse is a performance. Not that it is fake, but it is the refined product of practice you can't see unless you have practiced it yourself. When you go see an orchestra and wonder why you can't get up on stage and just jam with them, is it censorship, or is being a part of that performance the effect of something that takes a lot of effort to be welcome in? Start your own punk orchestra or get good enough to be welcome in an officially sanctioned one.

My conversations have been on signal groups, slack, pints with fraternal bros, meeting people while travelling and motorcycle camping, drinking at family bbqs, are typically with other men, and an less on boats these days. What they all have in common is they have a bar to entry of not being a sad sack. I agree that there are legitimately lame orchestra admission rules on official social media, but think about what being open, funny and welcome really means, and I guarantee you will get invited everywhere.

There are plenty of interesting conversations on the Internet, but relatively few happen in large communities, because those prevent many deep conversations from happening just by their nature.

...that wasn't a answer. Here's an answer.

Although their flaws are numerous and well-documented, including their often distasteful beliefs, and although their communities have tons of structural ideological bias, you should check out the "rationalist" community. They can be found on various forums. The discussions on touchy issues have largely moved to forums that are smaller but still public, which can be found with a bit of effort.

One issue with them, and at least one other community I know of with a lot of the "learn it yourself" mentality, is their relationship with subject-matter expertise and authority. It's bloody exhausting to defend oneself against a bunch of ignoramuses in a debate in a tree-style forum, so there's a lot of weird crap ideas floating around. But, at least it's vaguely what you're looking for.

The open and largely unspoken secret of the internet is that only the mentally or emotionally unbalanced post here. The ratio of people who use the internet to people who post regularly on the internet is something like 1000:1. Only nutters talk on the internet.

> late-night dinners with VCs or yacht rides with rich people

Wat? Where are you coming from?

> conversations that are deep about touchy issues

Everybody does this, all the time. Maybe your friends are too shallow for you?

> Where are the places to start (and continue) conversations about important issues without self-censoring and walking on eggshells?

Go ahead and have them, right here on Hacker News.

If you're "self-censoring and walking on eggshells" and you're NOT just an asshole, then you just need to study rhetoric. It's an ancient art, thousands of years old, there's plenty of material to work with.

If you're well-spoken (and your opinions or ideas are not simply odious) then who cares if people get mad at you? It's on them to reply in kind or they're the assholes, eh?

There are people willing to entertain strange ideas. A minority. The "strangers".

And there is everybody else. The vast majority. The "normies"

Everybody talks to everybody on the internet. Therefore every stranger is surrounded by normies.

At best the stranger is ignored. At worst he is shouted down.

This creates a ubiquitous field of strange idea suppression.

One must find a private club. That's hard.

There is a weird absence of private clubs on the internet. Or at least they are hard to find.

I guess any private club that advertises its existence immediately gets stuffed with normies.

Your suspicion is probably correct, and in terms of places you can go (online) to have a conversation that is asynchronous, long form, and comparatively private, I think it's all gone off the public-facing internet, at least for many categories of discussion. Slack, Discord, Matrix, probably some other platforms I'm not cool enough to know about.

A long, long time ago, I ran a BBS: now I run a Mattermost server. Feels like about the same level of quality to me. The conversations there run the gamut from lower (more vulgar, less mature) to higher (more in-depth, lengthier, more thoughtful, taking place over a longer time frame) than, say, Twitter, Reddit, or HN.

It's not hard to set up an invite-only, hosted chat server. It is somewhat harder to convince people to use it, because a lot of people don't want to run another app.

If I had to choose today, I would go with a Matrix-based solution rather than Mattermost, but it wasn't available at the time. Most solutions, including Mattermost, lock you in by not letting you export the (full, including DMs) conversation archive, so you have to choose something you want to stick with for a while.

My take is, that people don't converse properly anymore. We're too afraid of upsetting some hitherto unidentified minority or having an unpopular opinion that may get us cancelled.

Online discourse is certainly not safe anymore, so yes we do self censor, and because of that we get out of the habit of expressing raw thought or trying to challenge the status quo for fear of being reported or banned.

It's a real shame. The internet was supposed to be this great opportunity to unify people and help push through a new way of collaboration and debating, yet it's become an albatross around all our necks.

Without healthy debate with controversial or opposing opinions we are never exposed to any viewpoints that differ from our own, so we all just end up swimming in our own echo chamber fishbowls, and the field of intellectual thinking just dies.

I'd like to wax on further about this, but I'm typing (badly) on my phone which is in itself to blame for the brevity of online conversation.

Step 1 is make friends with intelligent people who don't think the same way you do. If you are really looking for interesting and challenging conversation this is a prerequisite. A stranger doesn't know you and when you inevitably hit a point where they begin to question your motives or your seriousness or how informed you are, they will not give you the benefit of the doubt repeatedly. Eventually a stranger will write you off.

But if you have an established friendship with someone, and have a baseline of trust and respect, then you can have those challenging discussions. But make sure you are really open to being wrong. Most people are not.

Interesting discussion between people who disagree about important issues never really existed online. As someone who has been online since the 80s, you can take my word. The internet is mostly good at matching up people who agree due to the effect I mentioned above.

Rich people on yachts?

I've been having these types of conversations with my brother nearly every day of the week for the past two decades.

There are no barriers to what we can discuss. No eggshells needed. He's a rational, intelligent person. I certainly wouldn't put our conversations on Twitter (or Reddit or xyz), who has time or care to deal with explaining to morons/irrational people/mentally ill people/partisans/whatever why their feelings/emotions/politics/opinions aren't the center of the universe - and who cares what strangers and anons think anyway in most circumstances; their opinions, their thoughts, their feedback, it's all overwhelmingly worthless.

I have a couple of friends I can do this with as well. They're out there, find them.

> conversations that are deep about touchy issues are nowhere to be found on the internet anymore. Perhaps they have moved to late-night dinners with VCs or yacht rides with rich people?

What are the touchy conversations on yacht rides with rich people - how to avoid the mistakes Jeffrey Epstein made with his private jet private island child sex trafficking operation?

I'm building a site like HN where the goal is to reward quality contributions, while also allowing one to filter by topic (sort of like how Reddit has subreddits).

https://zsync.xyz

Definitely a chicken and egg problem to attract users, but I've got some ideas in the works...

Interesting discussions can happen on pretty much any forum/platform.

It's not the 'where' that matters, it's the 'who'. It's the people having the conversation. I've had meaningful conversations on Disqus more than once, which normally you would not think would be a place you could have such conversations.

I think this is what Radiopaper (https://radiopaper.com/) is what it’s trying to solve.

Previously discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31210680

Interesting conversations online have gone the way of the Dodo Bird. Many platforms need to be advertiser friendly, you need lots of moderation to get onto the app stores, and if somehow an interesting places does spring up eventually one of the big players finds a way to take it down.

I believe that deep and interesting conversations need to have stakes. In your example with VCs, stakes would be trying to figure out where the market is going or trying to strike a deal. Latter also works for rich people.

In context of modern social media, the main stake is emotional involvement. Which is often a sign of a shallow understanding of a subject.

Take reddit conversations on controversial subjects. There would be loud statements with many upvotes and counterpoints with many downvotes. And downvotes discourage debating for regular people. So you are left with homogenous opinions and trolls.

I think interesting conversations may happen with individuals that you stumble upon by chance. Easiest way to get lucky is to be involved in some community that fits your interests.

not sure what you're alluding to. you can easily navigate to 4chan and have as many controversial public conversations as you want. or you can make irl friends. or you can see a therapist and confirm that you have an antisocial worldview. many options for you, friend.

Small communities that do not tolerate thought control.

Am I the only one confused by 'interesting' and 'touchy issues'? Is it some kind of code phrase? The author seems to be fishing for places to discuss particular unnamed issues. Do tell!

I have thought along similar lines, and I think one's own abilities determine the places you end up :), meaning that the more one knows, the more likely one will end up in deep conversations with deep thinking people in sites or situations that are buried in the net and/or in life out there. I'm pretty sure I'm excluded from these events :D.

edit: but on the other hand, it's quite easy to get in touch with famous and brilliant people if that's what you like, so... if you have something interesting to say, maybe you'll get somewhere that way.

I'd start with defining what "important issues" are

Why? because there's many of them and each of them may attract different groups of people, thus different discussions groups, forums, etc.

Private signal groups, mostly, or in-person conversations.

IMO, private dinners. For similar reasons I stopped attending conferences and shows because there was no-longer anything of interest that could be discussed there. That and a general decline in SnR. Once upon a time I would even speak at such events, at the invite of analyst firms. No longer. But more often than not I’ll take up an invite to a private dinner if there are interesting participants.

I see this question often but I hardly ever see the people asking starting the conversations they wish to see. Build it and they will come... but

I have a few questions:

1) What is an interesting conversation even? Seriously. In my experience there's endless 'interesting' conversation happening on the big site aggregates, even if you have to do a little work to do it. Most of it doesn't just happen to you though.

2) Was there ever a time when deep conversations were happening on the internet? Really, truly. I wouldn't consider stumbling on a thread and reading it unique to old internet.

3) Deep and touchy? You're going to have to define Deep. Because, pick your interest. The depth of information to be found and conversations to be had about... picking a random interest of mine - Visual Art. I can go on Youtube or Twitter and see any number of threads about: NFTs and their place in the wider space, same with AI Generated Art. I can find videos on technique that are deep and technical. There's any number of discord servers to join that if you engage in good faith, people will respond in kind. (One trick is to simply ignore folks who make 'derailing' comments. Here's a secret I thought everyone knew: Trolls and the ironic posters want attention, if you don't give it to them they simply go away; Their biggest fear is being boring, use that against them lol)

I'd be interested in what examples you have of 'self-censoring' and 'walking on eggshells'. Seriously. Even the most 'Touchy' subjects I can think of, take your pick of culture war nonsense, if you engage earnestly, deeply, intellectually, there's open discussion to be had.

I sometimes think Twitter could be used for this.

But it seems you have to bring your own audience to Twitter. At least that is what I witness. Everyone who got a conversation going over there was a celebrity outside of Twitter already.

Are these interesting conversations producing things? Where’s the interesting output?

I have my suspicions, but I hate being that cynical…

In the early days these conversations were found on IRC. I think today, Discord is the modern version of IRC.

between interesting and interested people, so mostly between peers working on the same/similar problems

twitter and it's many groupchats

Twitter is your best bet.

Twitter