This question comes up every year (I've seen it for the nearly 2 decades of HN), and the answers are never satisfying.
Other industries just don't have an HN equivalent, either for lack of trying or because hackers are good making and using things like HN when others aren't.
You could build a HN clone for them for that purpose, but I tell you the problem would be onboarding users.
I built a HN clone for someone who wanted it focused on just E-Commerce discussions, but it failed to take off. Also didn't help that the person wanted to monetize it using a pay-to-use model. It never took off.
Of course: for psychology, various other medical fields, and plenty of creative fields a HN-equivalent would be gold.
But it's impossible without their equivalent of @dang managing their equivalent of a forum of smart people who have a deep allergy to being marketed to/advertised at/BS'd or enshitified at. They need a HN-like immune system, often grossly overzealous and way too self-serious, that actively polices things like this.
This is the sort of a smug self-satisfied hot take that makes many non-SWEs recoil from this community.
Outside of tech, there are plenty of thoughtful communities of practice, tended by community leaders no less wise and dedicated than dang.
What HN has is YC. Its the financial estuary -- you come here to make contacts, not friends, and you come here to rub shoulders with people doing the work. And maybe, just maybe, have your own work recognized.
You can get those for much cheaper in e.g. a field like medicine, because promotion tends to happen on the basis of long-term deliverables delivered, rather than vibes about potential hyper scale returns a few years down the road. Simply, professionals are constructed as less desperate/opportunistic in other disciplines.
Other fields, like for example those that abut the artworld, are massively and aerobically served by a wide range of venues. Opportunity and curiosity are evenly distributed among them.
But that's not how our game works. Reputational opportunity is the gravity here, and we are all to some degree opportunists here, of varying degrees of success.
It's centralization. Our secret sauce is centralization.
You’d think so, but then what’s the HN for those various fields?
Their communities of practice tend to enshitify after just a handful of years, turn into professional flame wars on the same old topics, or otherwise ossify into something that just repeats the talking points of the day.
I've been in a number of these communities: you leave for 5 years and come back and it's the same discussions repeated forever, or news posted that's weeks or months out of date. They don't generate, they regurgitate, and slowly.
The Fediverse (specifically Lemmy and PieFed) have much higher signal to noise ratios and are frequented by the same folks you see here in a lot of cases. Additionally, their APIs are open and free.
As a frequenter of Lemmy (and I suppose PieFed because it's federated), it's really the opposite of HN culturally for better and worse. The only thing that feels the same is that most Lemmy users only look at the "All" feed so it basically becomes one feed like here on HN. I haven't browsed Reddit since the API issue, but I remember it being a lot more usable in the way GP suggests, i.e. subscribing to individual communities to engage with. I've found the SNR on Lemmy to also be poor for quite a few reasons, so if you're right about Reddit's being worse then I have to wonder how it's still as popular as it is.
Reddit is deteriorating every day like China's economic model is ever-closer to collapse each day - oft-repeated claims that become ever harder to believe when they've been trotted out, on the daily, for fifteen years whilst seemingly never getting any truer.
Personal theory is, you can get into a state where you'd still growing due to network effects, as you're the main location for some topics, but new communities go somewhere else, so you're losing that traffic.
Some of Discord's largest servers are for AI tools, as it seemed like the logical choice when they were getting going. A couple years earlier I'm sure it would have been reddit.
I'm on HN mainly to keep up with surveillance and privacy news and tech. I have a number of sources I pull from, including:
OSINT blogs and resources like indicator news, Bellingcat
404 Media
Individual Blogs like michaflee.com, Zach wittackers "This week in security"
Courtwatch.news
Privacy related forums like privacyguides.org
Academic sources like Workshop on Privacy in Electronic Society, etc etc.
I'll spin up an n8n instance at some point to sift through everything I find.
I notice a lot of the suggestions are news-oriented. However, the thing I like about HN are all the non-news gold nuggets about tech. I'd love to find such gold nuggets for other industries as well.
Unsure why @Nathanf22's comment was downvoted to death. I would also suggest Lobste.rs and Reddit. But then again, RSS seems to work quite well in my case.
Probably because it seems AI-generated, and suggesting dev.to is in line with that - that place is actually an absolute cesspit of slop (SNR 1:100), as far as I have seen.
In the meantime I've bookmarked quite a few more on literature, politics, and such, if it's of any interest. I've also made (a fairly weak) case for Jacobin here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44309069
This question comes up every year (I've seen it for the nearly 2 decades of HN), and the answers are never satisfying.
Other industries just don't have an HN equivalent, either for lack of trying or because hackers are good making and using things like HN when others aren't.
A psychologist told me a few days ago that they would love having an equivalent for their domain of work.
You could build a HN clone for them for that purpose, but I tell you the problem would be onboarding users.
I built a HN clone for someone who wanted it focused on just E-Commerce discussions, but it failed to take off. Also didn't help that the person wanted to monetize it using a pay-to-use model. It never took off.
https://github.com/wting/hackernews
Or use this, rebrand it; but I don't know if people in other fields would be turned off by the aesthetic and simplicity (?)
I remember seeing some green themed website that used Arc as a forum but I completely forgot what it was. Pretty active as well.
Of course: for psychology, various other medical fields, and plenty of creative fields a HN-equivalent would be gold.
But it's impossible without their equivalent of @dang managing their equivalent of a forum of smart people who have a deep allergy to being marketed to/advertised at/BS'd or enshitified at. They need a HN-like immune system, often grossly overzealous and way too self-serious, that actively polices things like this.
That's why there's no HN equivalent elsewhere.
This is the sort of a smug self-satisfied hot take that makes many non-SWEs recoil from this community.
Outside of tech, there are plenty of thoughtful communities of practice, tended by community leaders no less wise and dedicated than dang.
What HN has is YC. Its the financial estuary -- you come here to make contacts, not friends, and you come here to rub shoulders with people doing the work. And maybe, just maybe, have your own work recognized.
You can get those for much cheaper in e.g. a field like medicine, because promotion tends to happen on the basis of long-term deliverables delivered, rather than vibes about potential hyper scale returns a few years down the road. Simply, professionals are constructed as less desperate/opportunistic in other disciplines.
Other fields, like for example those that abut the artworld, are massively and aerobically served by a wide range of venues. Opportunity and curiosity are evenly distributed among them.
But that's not how our game works. Reputational opportunity is the gravity here, and we are all to some degree opportunists here, of varying degrees of success.
It's centralization. Our secret sauce is centralization.
This is both good and bad.
You’d think so, but then what’s the HN for those various fields?
Their communities of practice tend to enshitify after just a handful of years, turn into professional flame wars on the same old topics, or otherwise ossify into something that just repeats the talking points of the day.
I've been in a number of these communities: you leave for 5 years and come back and it's the same discussions repeated forever, or news posted that's weeks or months out of date. They don't generate, they regurgitate, and slowly.
There's nothing like HN, but the closest is Reddit.
If you're interested in programming then r/programming
If UFC, for example, then
r/ufc
r/mma
r/python
Just whatever it is you're interested in, there's likely a subreddit for it. The more niche it is, the better the quality of the sub.
Reddit is deteriorating by the day.
The Fediverse (specifically Lemmy and PieFed) have much higher signal to noise ratios and are frequented by the same folks you see here in a lot of cases. Additionally, their APIs are open and free.
As a frequenter of Lemmy (and I suppose PieFed because it's federated), it's really the opposite of HN culturally for better and worse. The only thing that feels the same is that most Lemmy users only look at the "All" feed so it basically becomes one feed like here on HN. I haven't browsed Reddit since the API issue, but I remember it being a lot more usable in the way GP suggests, i.e. subscribing to individual communities to engage with. I've found the SNR on Lemmy to also be poor for quite a few reasons, so if you're right about Reddit's being worse then I have to wonder how it's still as popular as it is.
Reddit is deteriorating every day like China's economic model is ever-closer to collapse each day - oft-repeated claims that become ever harder to believe when they've been trotted out, on the daily, for fifteen years whilst seemingly never getting any truer.
Personal theory is, you can get into a state where you'd still growing due to network effects, as you're the main location for some topics, but new communities go somewhere else, so you're losing that traffic.
Some of Discord's largest servers are for AI tools, as it seemed like the logical choice when they were getting going. A couple years earlier I'm sure it would have been reddit.
Reddit is infested with bots. Hn is not immune to astroturfing either.
The Eternal September is live and well.
And it's barely even March.
Not even a Long March.
Just to entirely mix metaphors.
I'm on HN mainly to keep up with surveillance and privacy news and tech. I have a number of sources I pull from, including:
OSINT blogs and resources like indicator news, Bellingcat 404 Media Individual Blogs like michaflee.com, Zach wittackers "This week in security" Courtwatch.news Privacy related forums like privacyguides.org Academic sources like Workshop on Privacy in Electronic Society, etc etc.
I'll spin up an n8n instance at some point to sift through everything I find.
I notice a lot of the suggestions are news-oriented. However, the thing I like about HN are all the non-news gold nuggets about tech. I'd love to find such gold nuggets for other industries as well.
X.com is my new go to especially after I found enough interesting accounts to follow.
NASA Space Flight [1] is the forum for anything and everything space industry related.
[1] - https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/
Punchbowl News is a great source for American congressional politics. They have a newsletter for free that goes out every weekday at 6 AM.
GitHub trending is one that comes to mind
Unsure why @Nathanf22's comment was downvoted to death. I would also suggest Lobste.rs and Reddit. But then again, RSS seems to work quite well in my case.
Probably because it seems AI-generated, and suggesting dev.to is in line with that - that place is actually an absolute cesspit of slop (SNR 1:100), as far as I have seen.
Thanks for the explanation. I wasn't aware that dev.to is of such low quality.
Perhaps this is because programmers know how to use AI. And they thought it would be a good idea to generate content using AI.
But other programmers who see this content immediately realize that it was generated and stop reading it.
Can you recommend some of your favorite RSS feeds for non-technical topics?
Sure. Here is an older list that I shared a while ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28911253
In the meantime I've bookmarked quite a few more on literature, politics, and such, if it's of any interest. I've also made (a fairly weak) case for Jacobin here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44309069
Lobste.rs for the more technical deep-dives — smaller community but higher signal-to-noise ratio.
Dev.to and Zenn for longer-form technical writing, though the quality varies a lot.
For architecture and system design specifically, the Software Architecture subreddit (r/softwarearchitecture) has surprisingly good discussions.
HN remains the best for the intersection of tech + business + ideas.