I had this problem for years. And then I picked an open source project that uses the same language and tools and started contributing to it. I made some great friends and the mailing list was always live with discussion that was often much broader than the thing we were building. Over the years we also met live on a couple of conferences, had drings/dinners together and it really helped me fill the void of working alone on commercial side.

This!

Since there are no more upvote-points, we can't know how many people agree with the comment, so "this" are again required (or show alternative).

I do not need to know how many people agree with something to know whether I agree or disagree with it.

There's no need to show upvote points; just order it so I'm more likely to read the things that other people think are worth reading. I can judge it myself without seeing N "this" comments or upvote points beside it.

Whoooosh

My comment is at +15 currently. ;)

Yeah, and if you build it using some wonky code built from legacy PHP, I'm sure the next person in will love you for it.

(Not saying you do it, I see it all the time).

I hear that, the convos at some dev shops leaves a lot to be desired when you're bombarded with work. Hanging out on IRC with like-minded people who like Lisp/Scheme, more hardcore javascript coding than plain old jQuery and Free Software is far more fun than talking to marketing heh.