from Hacker News

What is the modern equivalent of Google Groups?

by legohorizons on 8/24/24, 8:36 PM with 18 comments

• by al_borland on 8/25/24, 5:10 AM

  When I was in college it was all about forums. I belonged to many, and it was my favorite era of the internet. There were people I talked to everyday for a decade, and formed many real life friendships as a result.

  Facebook and Reddit really killed forums. Some our still around, but most are a shell of what they once were. The ones I was really involved in all shutdown after members started to spend more and more time on Facebook.

  HN is really my only outlet anymore. I was on Digg until v4, then spent many years on Reddit, but it never had a sense of actual community. Reddit also became intolerable quite a while ago; I haven’t been there in a couple years.

  It feels a bit sad to say, but the collapse of forums left a hole in my life and I’ve had a lot of trouble trying to find someone to fill it.

  Sorry I don’t have many helpful suggestions, but I can tell you you’re not alone. I think the formation of these mega sites really hurt the internet. When sites reach a certain size the individual disappears and users all blend together.

• by palata on 8/25/24, 3:47 PM

  I think good communities exist, but it's not necessarily easy to find them. Some comment here mentions USENET, and I think it was from a different time, where there was a very strong filter based on who joins Internet communities (only a specific subset of people were doing that). Now pretty much everyone does. It's probably easy to find a community of Taylor Swift's fans because there are so many, harder to find a niche community.

  The hard thing, IMO, is that it's also very hard to promote those communities to the people who would fit. If a community is over-advertised, then many people will join and alter it, maybe destroying it (say you have this nice community of mobile development that talks about Kotlin and Swift, and in a few weeks you get 3000% more users who all love PWAs... it won't be the same community anymore).

  One could hope that algorithms would be very good at creating perfect communities of people who match with each other, but it's hard to say from history that social networks are good at that except for a few examples were they actually grouped together people with pretty radical opinions and it was not exactly great.

• by can3p on 8/27/24, 12:34 PM

  I’ve been scratching my own itch lately trying to build a communication medium that I like.

  IMO the problem with current social networks is their scale and public only approach. Any network that goes this way ends up with lots of bad actors and public only approach means that it’s easy to harass people and bots are economically viable.

  I’ve addressed both points [0]. Visibility of the posts is limited to direct connections, you need a proxy connection to make a new one and at the same time it’s mega easy to import/export, markdown support and apis are there etc. That was my way to get miningful discussions back.

  In general, you need to look to small scale places

  [0]: https://github.com/can3p/pcom

• by deafpolygon on 8/29/24, 4:07 AM

  I think, the "modern" equivalent is Discord. Unfortunately, it is what it is. mastodon, etc, tends to be popular for fringe / less mainstream politi-think.

  > now im tryna do more serious work and cant find the right spots for it

  you won't find /that much/ places for serious work - reddit certainly isn't it. twitter is definitely not.

• by scottedwards on 8/24/24, 11:38 PM

  I feel your pain. I was lucky enough to be around to enjoy the days when the ONLY place online where people were discussing serious topics (and non-serious ones!) was USENET (and maybe The Well). Google Groups just started to throw a web interface on USENET.

  Sadly, once big money entered the Web in the late 90's, every Portal popping up felt like they had to include discussions/message boards into their features.

  Yahoo Groups was big in the day and is now essentially dead. Same with Facebook, etc.

  Now everything is very fragmented. There are some really great discussions happening out there (metafilter.net is a good example) but they are hard to find.

  Reddit might be the closest thing to a groups/USENET replacement that we have.

  I'd love to hear about anything else out there that may save civil discourse, but I have my doubts it exists (or will). (although web3 may save us yet - nostr is pretty interesting)

  After all, what does it mean when 90% of people spend their time on Instagram and Tiktok?

• by jazz_from_hell on 8/25/24, 3:20 PM

  In general, the best online conversations I read/participate in take place on Slack.

• by PaulHoule on 8/24/24, 8:48 PM

  Try subject-specific forums like dpreviews.com, polyamory.com, coderanch.com, etc. Think about Quora but with 98% less enshittification.