Ask HN: Where do you browse and chat outside of here?

> I've been on Reddit for over 15 years and yeah, it feels quite different than it did early on. I can't really stand browsing r/all or r/popular at all.

It's because the age gap, the average redditor is way too young. In a discussion the other day an user sent me to "get bullied at school"... I am in my 40s.

The new layout, putting attached images and videos on the index, ruined Reddit forever. I recently went there to see what thoughts people on there had on a specific subject, only to find nothing but a stream of meme and social media posts. You really can't call it a forum anymore.

> I miss the days of having 255 friends on AIM, trout slaps on well-populated mIRC channels, and never-ending threads on niche Ultimate Bulletin Board forums.

Yeah me too. Another comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43409370) expresses a similar dismay at the lack of really engaged discussion.

I have a theory that this phenomenon is largely the result of smartphones and the concomitant constant connection to the internet. Paradoxically, being always connected has made it harder to connect.

It used to be that in order to participate in a real-time conversation, you had to be sitting at your computer. You were ready to chat. You would chat with other people who were also at their computers ready to chat. When you were done you would put up your away message and re-enter the real world.

If you wanted to post on a bulletin board or some other non-real-time forum, again you had to be at your computer. You would post what you wanted to post. When you left and came back later you would check to see if anyone replied and you'd be excited to read their comments. (LiveJournal is the thing that sticks in my mind for this; it was big when I was in college.)

Now, instead of being either online, ready to engage, or offline, engaging in person, people are always half and half. Also, smartphones have driven the proliferation of "notifications", which then have been abused by apps to the point where people are constantly deluged with so many notifications that they can't distinguish the ones they might actually care about. (I've had glimpses of this when I use someone else's tablet or phone for some reason.) Since everyone is assumed to be always reachable, there's no perceived need to say "bye" or indicate when you are temporarily not paying attention to a sync interaction, so those interactions come in unpredictable spurts. And since everyone can always check everything from their phone, responses in async interactions are often dashed off haphazardly. So we get a sort of worst-of-both-worlds mix of sync and async.

I've been seeing more AI slop being posted on reddit even on smaller subreddits. Whatever people are using to do it likes to somewhat randomly bold certain words to emphasize them so it stands out a bit once you notice it.

It's always wild to me that anyone actually uses reddit by looking at the front page or r/all or whatever. For years when I would go to reddit.com I was like "why is this even a thing". It's only once I found a few small subreddits that I found anything useful there. Most of it is a firehose of garbage.

I joined several discords, some of significant size, but I just cannot understand how to start/join a conversation. I just see silence or some random Q&A that dies within a few rounds of back and forth.

I really wanna do some goofy chatting and socialize online in real time, but I must be doing it wrong because it seems like nobody's there. I also tried IRC (went in for the first time in 20 years?!), same story there. Probably I am the problem, but any suggestions?

lotta astroturfing here too, mon ami.

great money to be made getting the HN tech bro demographic on to something.

lemmy is pretty sparse outside of tech-ish instances. hard to get excited about it sometimes.

double edged sword of platform adoption -- no one is there so you dont go, but if you don't go no one is there.

What RSS feeds do you subscribe to?

Not sure if this is what they meant, but Reddit is just Facebook for younger people. The outrage is the same, the click bait, the like hunting and the general attention seeking. There's some good stuff, absolutely, but the same is true for Facebook.

If you're not part of a sub-culture, and a narrow one at that, then Reddit content is pretty much your run of the mill click bait. Just like with Facebook, I think that the good Reddit content is either in private or really niche sub-reddits. Things like AskReddit, Politics, AITA or any of the subreddits linked at the top of site, they are all pretty Facebook like content, just spewing out much faster.

> What do you mean when you say

Can I offer a perspective you can add to the interpretations?

Apart from the staggeringly low "effort" you will find in it, and behaviours that in proper societies will have the offender's skull broken, it is (was?) a place you surely would visit were you for some reason interested in groups like "the budding party of those convinced of some personally held stance and visiting the premises to just shout that their guts are right, to woo the likeminded and boo the onlookers".

Being that "ideological hooliganism with the pre-Popperian tint of 'To the man with a hammer everything looks like a nail'" bestial, of a widespread bestiality, that would be "mainstream".

(Of course being it made of chambers there can - and will - be exceptions, but that is the environment which allowed that general culture on which to possibly build exceptions.)

Surely there's a sampling bias here.

The most likely people to respond on a thread like this are those spending the most time on HN, and thus least likely to be spending it elsewhere. The user sharing time between 5 communities might not even see the thread.

Are you ever worried that someone in the group will get mad and start leaking conversations?

could you and some others list some of the subreddits worth visiting?

Ditto Signal. In my local city some Burning Man regulars created a giant Signal group for sharing parties and events. Nearly a thousand members in the same city who post about something to do any night of the week. It's lovely. To join you just need somebody within the group to vet you and you're in.

Group chats reign supreme once you are in good ones.

Thanks! This is a fun list with a lot I want to read further on