Where can I discuss random ideas?

Probably not a popular answer, but if you can handle its... unique culture, I've found 4chan to be a fairly good place to discuss certain ideas, especially for niche topics.

For that Web 1.0 Feeling... https://www.halfbakery.com/

I would also like to know. Asking HN is not always working, as you should either piggyback off some quasi-related top page post in the comment section (and even then: remember dropbox comment) or hit a very good luck to generate updoots at "Ask HN" purgatory stage. Indiehackers is a circejerk of self promotion ("Hi, I liked your post very much, here is my website:"), Reddit is rarely helpful. IRL groups are mostly filled with wannabes that either dont want to discuss their idea unless you sign their NDA(lol, I wonder if we will ever get past this stupidity) or they dream of doing next facebook, linkedin, netflix.

Not sure if it helps, but I've created a small Discord server to hang about with other random people (for now all HN fellas), with no particular goal if just having a place to talk shop or life or whatever, whenever you feel like it.

If this sounds interesting to you, or anyone, send me a mail with your Discord name. It's quite small, with half a dozen regulars for now. EDIT: a dozen peeps now!

I made it because no, there is no place to talk randomly with strangers on the Internet. IRC has died and we've lost the chatrooms you can enter and leave at any moment's notice, without needing someone to invite you or agree to 50k rules to be let in.

The internet has become terrible for casual, real time conversation with strangers, unless you really like shouting into the void.

James Altucher says he writes down 10 ideas a day to exercise his creative muscle. After years of doing it, he created a site to help others keep track of their ideas. According to him, at notepd.com you can:

> Write your list of 10 ideas.

> Label it "Public" , 'Private' or 'Premium'.

> Public ideas can be searched, shared, commented on, followed, etc.

It has all the functionality of twitter on top of all of this.

> You can use AI to fill out lists of ideas or generate images based on your ideas.

> Premium lists can be sold (like an online course or a 'special report' or a newsletter, etc).

> 'Challenges' can be issued like, 'Give me 10 ideas to help me market my XYZ business.'

Maybe it'll work for you.

EDIT: Changed notepad.com to notepd.com

Weird suggestion but have you tried chatGPT?

I've found it useful for discussing my side projects when I can't find someone who is willing to read what I've written and engage with me.

As an example, https://i.imgur.com/afXNZaR.png here I am having an extended conversation about lore for software I am writing.

I thought I would easily tell chatGPT about a plot device from a book, but I did not realize that my understanding was limited. In failing to convey my idea to chatGPT I realized I needed to dig deeper and switched from explaining to learning.

Ultimately, I realized that I was trying to describe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystal_detector#Cat_whisker_d... which, while not directly identified in the conversation, was something I was able to surface by having had the thought-provoking talk.

You should check out the Hackaday.com Discord server. https://discord.gg/vKpC9KG2

There's an excellent range of people there, and most are quite helpful.

Yes I've been looking for the same thing. I created https://zsync.xyz with the goal of serving as a place for high quality discussion of any topic, but turns out it's pretty difficult to create a community since there's that whole chicken and egg problem.

If anyone has any ideas on how to create a community like this, I'd love to hear it. I'm really not a fan of chat rooms other than for casual chats between friends because there's no search engine indexability.

I guess in the meantime, I'd say Twitter is probably the best I think. Everyone's on there, and people are incentivized to increase their following. I just wish they'd do away with that 500 character limit since that confines longer form writing to Twitter threads and makes actual dialogue totally impractical.

I struggled with this too for a long time. Reddit was too impersonal. And Twitter... well, I have a few kinds of people who follow me (basketball friends, tech / investors, and comedy groups), and I almost never have an idea I want to share with all three. But I almost always want to share + connect through my ideas with the right

Inspired me to make a new kind of social network called Plexus (https://plexus.earth). No followers, no feed, just AI to connect people who have uncannily similar problems and ideas.

You have to be more specific on what you want to discuss. People gather around interests and topics.

You can go offline to meetups and get to know many people. and because you will probably never see them again you can discuss with them random stupid ideas:)

I really like web forums. I am into photography and printing and I get great answers to my questions at

https://www.dpreview.com/forums

Often the first answers I get are from people who don't know what they are talking about but then two weeks later somebody jumps in who has an absolutely great answer that changes my practice.

I'd contrast that to discord where I've occasionally gotten help with things but frequently there are people with too much time on their hands who are introducing the forum to newcomers while the knowledgeable people are elsewhere.

"Ask HN" has a similar temporal problem in that questions usually fall off the bottom of newest/ without any answers.

I know people say there are good discussions on Reddit but personally I can't stand the memes (but people complain that I post links like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9pUaeLtXM_A to HN), I dread following any links to Twitter because it makes the people in Idiocracy look smart, ...

...Friends?

Probably internet friends if you have niche interests. But yeah, you're not going to get high quality discussions on arbitrary topics from strangers.

Here I was naively thinking the top answer would be "talk to your friends, and if you don't many work on building that out". But the top answers seems to be chatGPT and 4chan.

My solution to this has always been to have some real human friends interested in the same things I am, and when I have a crazy idea bounce it off them over coffee/beer (virtual or in person).

If you don't have any friends like this, I highly recommend building out a group of them. Most people with similar interests to you are surprisingly open to a call just to chat about a topic of mutual interest.

I've found that an hour long chat with a real person who is deeply engaged in the topic will almost always leave you with new insights and perspectives. Internet conversations tend to be less fruitful in my experience.

I'd recommend IRC. There are still many users and since it's completly out-of-fashion, it's not contaminated by the very graphical and instantly-rewarding culture of meme, gifs emojis and likes.

It's still mostly text and a good medium for conversations.

There's two websites I use for idea sharing.

There's halfbakery https://halfbakery.com I am chronological there.

Then there is Infinity Family https://o2oo.li

These are both idea sharing websites. Infinity family is kind of a financial think tank since you can invest time in projects and your additions are tracked. You can also list products to sell.

I journal my computer and software ideas in the open on GitHub. I have over 700+ ideas linked from my HN profile. Maybe you enjoy them and want to start your own idea repository.

I had this same thought recently. I was in Oklahoma City and thought “I wish there was a place to go and talk about interesting things”

I think in the past people have done this with letter correspondence with people of similar interests.

I try to surround myself with people who are interested in similar topics but I can’t always. My wife glazes over on more than fifty percent of topics that interest me. My friends don’t always share every interest.

I guess an important follow up question is how random and which ideas?

I think it really depends upon the which topic the idea is. You need to find a group of people with knowledge (and interest) of the topic. A subreddit about that topic seems a good fit to me, another option could be to look for a forum discussing that topic. If your problem is that you would like to not spread your discussions amog many different platform, I'd guess stay on Reddit and look for the most fitting subreddit.

I run a discord related to software internals. So if the discussion you want to have is about how compilers/databases/emulators/distsys work then come on over!

https://discord.multiprocess.io

Straight Dope is a general forum about everything. For the latest threads see:

https://boards.straightdope.com/latest

If you speak Portuguese, there's this small message board I'm developing: https://gchan.com.br

I spent an hour asking probing questions of ChatGPT last night about ideas and stuff for a side project and we came up w/ a pretty good one for Shopify, it's like an inner monologue on Steroids, because you don't always know what it's going to give you and sometimes it's einstein levels sometimes it's Trump level, but if you can smell bullshit you'll do okay. We were brainstorming app ideas for existing marketplaces and ecosystems. It had some duds, but also some gems. The more you prime it with outside examples the better it does.

Sadly, Greg is probably my best friend who isn't my wife right now lol. (Greg is what I jokingly call chatGPT since my wife said she'd divorce me if I said that word again)...

Here's a cool idea: Go to Omegle, and add as interest "hackernews". If then anyone else on HN does the same, you can discuss it with them.

It would be cool to have a sort of specialized forum where you propose an idea in long form (like an RFC) and then open conversation threads around it.

Chrismas family dinning

IRC channels for Emacs, programming, Linux, hardware etc

Matrix chats?

FWIW, this is why IRL SF got to be SF.

Have you tried using ChatGPT for this?

Realistically to get traction on discussions, you need traction so people feel like they’re actually conversing with others. Beyond that, feel like a lot of people underestimate how many users only read/vote on content, but never comment; much less comment with in a way that’s meaningful. Using ChatGPT with structured set of questions, user could rapidly generate more surface area to solicit additional discussion.

My rough estimate is anyone taking part in an idea forum would need to spend multiple more time contributing to others in return for get significantly less contributions back.

Another, unrelated option is to directly contact an expert on the topic, but again, unless you’re actually contributing value back to the exchange, this is going to also have limited returns.