Where to have good discussions online?

I miss forums. They were a better format for debate IMO.

HN is one of my favorite places on the internet - the themes, the people and the tone are really cool. But the ephemeral nature of posts is not good for discussing ideas. Threads for debating ideas in depth should last forever, as they did in forums.

I wish HN launched a forum feature, or that someone built something in parallel and they saw a massive influx from the HN community.

If someone has ideas on how to pull this off I’d be happy to contribute - I can design and code full-stack. My requirement to hop on board would be that we somehow manage to tie it to the HN values, themes and audience - I wouldn’t be so interested in an ex-novo community-building exercise.

Maybe we could start with some structured discovery work, gathering opinions from existing HN users - we know where to find them! - and take it from there.

No idea

    My solution is to "meditate" on the ideas and write blog posts, so that I don't bore my friends with the topics, anyone can read the blog or contact me if they really want to.

Sorry to have to say it ..

But the only place for this right now are some niche forums and 4chan.

Reddit and quora rely on "reputation" and vote not in arguments.

So it is more like an echo chamber.

On 4chan there is no "names/nicknames" no "reputation" or points.

Your argument has to stand on its own and will be teared apart.

Twitter is still a good and viable alternative but probably you need to invest a good amount of time and energy to curate your timeline and your following list.

Also need to invest time and energy on twitter search (https://twitter.com/explore) with know-how on search operators (https://github.com/igorbrigadir/twitter-advanced-search) to find the right topics and people you want to have a conversation with.

If you don’t mind discussing IRL, I have grown very fond of meetups. I host a JavaScript meetup and tried out different others (a startup meetup, one about DIY/Electronics). meetup.com is a great source for this. It also has the benefit that you will meet people that want to socialize and discuss topics. In the internet, I feel like people often feel obligated to discuss an opinion.

Formerly IRC, now Matrix, discord, slack etc, with a small community that actually likes each other is pretty good, but that's a shitty answer to the question, because invitation into these circles is almost always friend-of-a-friend.

The various rationalist spaces are at worst filled with pedantry, and at their best home to useful in depth discussions on very niche topics.

Some forums are good, but the majority seem to have a serious problem with the user base aging up and becoming very cliquish. I actually wish I knew why this clique behavior was so much more common on message boards than just about any other comms medium.

Reddit is mostly pretty bad, and as you mentioned seems to have poor moderation down to a near science. I actually think a lot of particularly bad mod practices and also common hostile mod-user interactions are driven by Reddit's global karma as a primary or secondary effect.

Depends what you mean by "have a discussion".

If what you really want is to re-examine controversial or contrarian positions (i.e. restart old flame wars), many places will not be very keen.

If you really want a platform to be heard, start a blog with a comments section and learn to promote it.

If what you want is a venue to test your logic against others who are similarly motivated... join an IRL debating club.

If you want to learn from experts, try YouTube channels and then go where they engage with their support base e.g. pay them on Patreon. Expert subreddits are good too if you are willing to play by the rules.

If you just want to shoot the breeze about casual topics, Twitter is still there.

(edit: formatting)

Stack Exchange sites depending on the topic (I'm just going to assume they generally don't have the toxicity of StackOverflow).

Also look around for smaller, more specific subreddits. As a general rule, the bigger the subreddit, the more moderated it will be.

Discord has been recommended. I'm backing it up. Same principle about moderation and size apply.

It wouldn't hurt to look at the comment section of a related blog post or even a YouTube video. The latter is scraping at the bottom of the barrel though.

Many subreddits have Discord servers for more discussion. They may also be moderated but give you the opportunity to have more back and forth with people on the topic.

You just need to find smaller subreddits, obviously in the big ones anything going against official leftist/progressive opinion is banned, deleted or downvoted into oblivion (HN is only slightly better in this aspect, but I would say there are smaller subs which are more open minded than HN)

I wish there was no downvote feature here and you could flag anything publically only with publically stating reason for flag without abusing this feature anonymously.

Reddit has been the only place. Stack overflow and Quora push against any form of discussion. Super annoying.

I don't think Reddit is the answer. The culture there is… somewhat hostile. YMMV.

If I were looking for good discussion on a particular topic, I would present my arguments in a post on my blog and enable comments. I think Chris Coyier's CSS Tricks website is a good example of this. He can moderate, set the topic, and set the tone.

>Maybe some kind of search engine for forums

https://boardreader.com Have not used it in years but it used to be good.

The reason Reddit is so heavily moderated is so that it stays a good place for discussion. Those rules are often in place because of prior bad experiences.

You don’t need a new search engine just Google Topic + forum or topic + Reddit. Smaller reddits are still ok.

YMMV

https://discussion.fool.com

Matrix chat is … interesting. Though beware, the crazy is infectious.

IRC - Libera Networks

I find teamblind.com very civilized.

If you want good quality discussion on the Internet, my experience is that the best place to find it is behind a paywall. The WELL is a long-standing example; I used to be a member, before becoming excessively frustrated with some of the personalities. You couldn't fault the depth of the discussions however.

It depends on what you mean by "discussion". There are many actions people call "discussion" that end up being disruptive and toxic to the community housing that action.

What do you mean by moderating on Reddit being frustrating? Are you trying to argue counter to observable fact?