Realistically signal/noise ratio of 0.05 to 0.01 is good enough in open forum comments. It's still possible to scan comments and find the signal from the noise.

Usenet was incredible before the eternal September. There was noise, trolls, flame wars and mentally instable people and good and bad moderation decisions, but the good was really good. Party due to the higher quality of the users and from the inability to make money from it. Top people were reading and lurking in relevant newsgroups and commented sometimes or sent private comment via email.

HN has two things common with Usenet, good moderation and higher than average users. What has changed is the motives. There are many users who are self promoting or marketing with pseudo-informative submissions. They push blog posts that are just written to increase visibility and "what I experienced when doing business", many of those stories made up. With all this negative stuff, HN has still good singal/noise ratio and you can learn from comments and discussions.

Do you know other such high quality comment places as hacker news or early Usernet?

Lobsters, I’d presume, but it’s invite only

Ask for an invite. That's how I got my account there. Be ready to supply an email address and be aware that at least some of thise who sends invites dig through posting history before sending an invite.

Also note that posting and commenting guidelines might be experienced as somewhat stricter than here.

Even the traditional PHP forum has all kinds of senseless 'flare' on each post. Post counts, signup dates, eye catching signatures, etc. A large portion of the screen space on your typical forum is still dedicated to attention seeking behavior.

IRC is better. There is very little on screen besides the discussion itself. IRC nicks can be used to grab attention, but there are only a few characters to work with so usually it's just a bit quirky but not really distracting.

IRC’s problem for deep conversations is that conversations in a chat medium are more ephemeral and that the shorter is better, not unlike Twitter, a format that exemplifies why shorter conversations do not give a great medium for longer/deeper conversations.

With forums, posts aren’t generally deleted except by maybe an admin if someone has been violating rules, and due to the permanence, people generally spend more time thinking what what they post.

With forums you often get a topic that has 500 posts, 480 of which are pure "me too / works for me" noise. Those 500 posts are split into 50 pages of 10 posts each, and page one has the oldest posts. The post with the answer is on page 46 and the pages after that are just 30-40 comments thanking whoever came up with the answer. So if you jump straight to the end then start working backwards, you're looking at maybe 10 or so page loads before you actually find the answer you're looking for.

Some forums aren't shit, but all of those cookie cutter PHP forums all seem to be shit.

QA forums are trash and they were totally replaced by stack exchange but general talk forums are still quite good. Private torrent trackers always have forums attached and the quality is usually quite good because its very hard to get a new account if you get banned.

From what I have seen, private forums are much more civil but its tough to actually build a community when its so much effort to join.

This is exactly why HN/Reddit format of tree-structured discussions is superior to linear phpBB forums. They allow for segregating subtopics (on a long forum thread, there are always subtopics and offtopics), letting you ignore the things that are not relevant to you.

Were I setting up a discussion forum today, I'd immediately look for something halfway between HN and Reddit. Reddit itself is too much of a PITA to host (we tried in our Hackerspace, but didn't go too far); HN has too little markup and no built-in functionality for storing notifications about replies.

lobste.rs has open source base IIRC and has notifications built in, at least in the public instance.

And a fair number of those thanks and me too posts are actually SEO spam with a profile link to some other unrelated site...

IRC deep conversations do happen and indeed you want persistence for those. Communities which rely on IRC use IRC logs for that. Perl projects use IRC that way and I think the Mozilla guys too.

And 4chan theoretically is better still, because the anonymity means posters are not rewarded at all for their contributions. Even the same poster, posting twice in the thread is not identifiable on most boards, allowing the discussion to be the primary focus. On the other hand, the culture of most *chans is to be abusive and confrontational, so who knows if it is any better.

In my experience 4chan has more attention seeking behavior than IRC (inline images facilitate it moreso than nicks), and on IRC users tend to be more friendly and aware of each other's humanity.

> and on IRC users tend to be more friendly and aware of each other's humanity.

I have been on IRC since 1993 but this is news to me.

'Friendlier than 4chan' is a pretty low bar.

For sure but "aware of each other's humanity" is ... not something I'd call your typical IRC dweller.

I actually think it’s the opposite. On traditional social media a mediocre post will still get a few likes. On 4chan a new thread needs to achieve quick popularity or it’ll get deleted within 5 minutes.

I think that is part of what fules the negative culture. The anonymity and lack of moderation surely helps but outrageous threads simply have a higher chance of surviving on 4chan.

Only on the megaboards. On slower ones like /n/ a thread can hang around for months if it has discussion.

4chan style threads with account names might actually be better. You can have really good discussions in imageboards (in the smaller boards) because you don't have a bunch of non-participants butting in with their upvotes and downvotes.

Even Metafilter with their very low key favorites "voting system" gives rise to a contest for getting the most favorites.

It's not popular on 4chan, but there are other smaller imageboards on which it's popular to use usernames (tripcodes in their parlance.) I can't say I'm a big fan.

Yeah I don't like people who go by names in imageboards either but that might mostly be because of the imageboard culture.

Serious question here- but how do I go about finding irc channels for stuff I’m interested in? When I was younger I loved irc but my warez days are long gone and I literally have no idea where to start looking anymore.

Probably just check the major networks for active channels.

There's not that many networks:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Internet_Relay_Chat_n...

You can also go in the other direction, checking if the stuff you are interested in lists a channel (which I realize is sort of obvious, whatever).

I've always started from topics that I'm interested in, then look if there is an IRC channel.

same way you find subreddits: hang out in one you like and people will invariably mention others.

> Even the traditional PHP forum has all kinds of senseless 'flare' on each post. Post counts, signup dates, eye catching signatures, etc. A large portion of the screen space on your typical forum is still dedicated to attention seeking behavior.

This is what drives me up a wall with forums. All. The. Visual. Noise. So much crap that obfuscates what I really want to look at.

This conversation reads like an xkcd strip. "Reddit style threads are the best." "Forums are ideal." "IRC is better." Half expecting this to progress to ARPANET or written letters.

A la https://www.xkcd.com/378/ (Real Programmers) or https://www.xkcd.com/435/ (Purity).

This seems to be a thing developer-type people struggle with a lot, and I really think it is an engineering mindset issue. We tend to like the things we have control over or understand completely, and technologies that have hidden parts (like Reddit or certain controversial programming languages) are disliked for their perceived dishonesty.

Let's make a web-browser-accessible persistent IRC with threads and no scores?

I believe you've described a major chunk of Slack's business model.

That's for team communication, not the same niche that reddit/Hacker News fill.

It's also used by "interest groups".

OpenStreetMap-US has a slack with ~1400 people.

Doesn't Discord fill the special interest group chat niche?

Chat, yes.

I wouldn't call HackerNews just a chat. It's articles, then some chat in the comments. That wouldn't work well with Discord I don't think? The main goal of HackerNews (for me) is to load it up, scroll, consume posts from the day, contribute/collaborate/ask questions/ etc. Discord is more about being engaged in the conversation as it is happening

No, but Slack arguably serves as a "web-browser-accessible persistent IRC with threads and no scores." I suspect what that describes wouldn't serve the same niche as Reddit/HN, either. It could, but the vibe would be very different.

IRCCloud. I'm not sure they have threads already, but they are close.

I definitely agree with this too.

Even imageboards like 4chan, in the smaller boards at least, you can get a decent discussion as there is no concept of upvotes nor automatic hiding of posts and replies are always in chronological order. The only main difference between them and a traditional forum is anonymity.

Back before the far right started getting really bad in the US (2004-2008ish) I even enjoyed /b/ on 4chan. There were several experiments that would be run on the board, with one eliminating IDs even within individual threads. The effect is that, every idea and comment is judged as-is, with no BS authority. Granted, still being in general a cesspool, and only a few years past its childporn heydays, often very negative ideas are given honest support.

But in the end, everything expires after a few hours anyway, no matter how popular, which I always thought was the true value of 4chan