One thing that makes traditional forums and groups work is that if any one participant leaves, the group conversations will continue without them.

I'm not really sure how that would work in a site where the conversations are focused around specific users.

Good point. Here is why I don't see that as a problem.

1. Things are democratic overall. You tend to follow people that share things that you like. You see what they post AND what they "upvote". Whenever someone votes on something, it also shares to their followers. Combined with some weighting on how popular a post is, and how recently it has been touched by someone else, this effectively means that you get a list of posts relevant to your interests, sorted by popularity. Any one person leaving would have negligible impact on your feed's content.

2. You also follow topic tags.

Some alternative's I have bookmarked:

https://hubski.com/

https://lobste.rs/

https://snapzu.com

https://soylentnews.org/

and Voat.

I don't really use them so I can't do a good review. I had some more bookmarked but can't find them at the moment.

Would you be able to send me an invitation to signup to lobste.rs please? mail at-symbol therobotking dotcom

I sent you the invite.

For some reason I can't reply to am1988 but maybe he's right, I don't know.

Any site which requires this type of thing to signup sounds like one I don't want to be a part of. Seems like a recipe for a hive mind.

You get a hive mind or you get regression to the mean, by which I mean you either aggressively filter for people with specific qualities, which is apparently a hive mind scenario, or you end up with the same kind of commentators you find on every other let-everyone-in platform.

So Hacker News is a regression to the mean, then?

Sure. It's much more general-interest than it used to be, and business content has cratered.