You missed the most important point:

3. Discussions

Try discussing anything on a random website.

Discussions, just like on HN, are usually better than the linked content.

Honestly, I have a strong interest in US, Chinese, European, and now Russian politics, and how they relate to the future of the humanity and all life on earth. It is clear that most real innovation happens much more quickly and decisively if centralized under a government that decides to spend a lot of money on research, so those are discussions and reading materials that I have to find on places like reddit. Ultimately, many of the decisions and things occurring today, while political, have deep personal philosophical roots. Discussions in particular spaces regarding that simply can't happen here due to the rules; rules that differ on different subreddits and for each community I agree with.

Reddit is the best place to find those, IMO.

I wouldn't be too sure about the statement that innovation happens faster under centralization (especially government). Rather I'd guess you get certain types of innovations.

How many years after we went to space using a central authority did it take before private enterprise could do it? How much did private enterprise depend on the technological development that arose from central and shared commitments to scientific development in that space?

We can have the same discussions about the NIH and new drug development (since most drugs simply can't make money). The internet, chips, Google itself was started as a federally funded post-grad project.

Things move much faster when we devote shared resources into risk taking that cannot make money. It might sound like waste, but government spending, I surmise, is what creates great economies. This occurs because technological advancement, especially those that can't obviously be exploited for financial gain in the market, are the true drivers of our economy.

Either way, we will soon begin to see who is right. There are several countries now competing with the US who were far behind when we went to our current model of low taxation, high free market. It should be interesting to see if their centralized scientific/technological systems outdo us over time.

And then no more. The real innovation happens today is more real and substantial. Whenever you use public fund even under dictatorship like Soviet Union and china today you just have a legitimacy issues - children vs space. I am on the space side but have Soviet Union got voyager ? And I also understand the stress NASA has.

You need both and totalitarianism never pay.

Clearly pure centralization doesn't work, and pure decentralization is chaos. The sweet spot is in between. Right now China seems to be in a better position than the US in that sense. They promote the same type of startups we have in Silicon Valley, and yet have an overarching centralized policy for the long term. In a way, the Chinese government acts as a sort of Facebook or Google.

Since you're interested in Russian politics I'd recommend checking out https://www.ridl.io/en/ if you haven't already. Online forums are great, and it's nice to combine that with some gatekeepered stuff

Please share some links to those materials. I’m interested in the same.

What I would recommend is that you spend some time on reddit and find them for yourself. Reddit has so many well-built communities, that it's difficult for me to suggest some. Even really vile parts of the site are good for understanding propaganda and how it works, and what it's saying today.

I've found that Reddit (in terms of content, not UI) has gotten somewhat better in recent years, while most discussion venues have either gotten much worse or gotten rid of commenting altogether.

In relative terms, it's superior to most of its alternatives (present site excluded, of course).

I really don't see much actual discussion on Reddit.

For all that it was a ghost town, if you could find some good conversation hosts / moderators on Google+, that site had some really good discussions. Probably mostly because it didn't try to scale.

(Yes, this was a hugely subjective experience, and depending on who you did or didn't follow, quality varied dramatically. The core G+ user group was probably ~100k or so English-literate participants, of whom a good 10-20k have ended up on the Pluspora Diaspora pod.)

I've both tried to start and gone looking for conversation on Reddit. The site conspires against this, in several ways.

If you're aware of specific subs that really shine and aren't afraid to name them, I'd appreciate it. (I can completely understand not wanting to out good discussion.)

Mind I'm contrasting discussion with merely good information, which Ask Historians, Ask Science, and a small set of other subs manage to achieve, with draconian (and much needed & welcomed) moderation.

I didn’t see a lot of discussion at Reddit. I saw echo chambers. I have since deleted my account and abandoned Reddit as a result. If I want focused discussion I find somewhere without a visible vote marker like HN or IRC.

Kickass moderation by committed individuals who are also experts in the field.

See AskHistorians, Science, ModeratePolitics etc.

This combined with huge communities results in incredible conversations.

And the obverse is r/sanfrancisco with moderation that has turned the sub into a sunset travel pic slide show punctuated by golden gate bridge pictures. What a wasted opportunity for something interesting. And it is leaking into r/bayarea ruining it as well.

Interesting phenomenon. It's eerily similar to r/Boston.

You overestimate the skills of moderators... I doubt very much that true experts in their fields would spend any time doing moderation Reddit... most likely, people doing that would be recent graduates trying to learn and impart their recently gained knowledge upon laymen.

There are several subs I'm aware of which do seem to garner expert-level moderation.

The Asks -- Science, Historians, possibly Economists (I'm trying to decide there -- the mods talk expertise, though quality IMO lags). Several of the Fitness subs are quite good. Various technical subs attract high-quality contributors, and the CSS support sub (specifically for styling old-style Reddit custom stylesheets) is simply superb. I've dug into energy topics, and though there's a bit of BS flung about, there's also quality expertise.

Posting online actually is a form of shingle-hanging and getting a sense of issues people are facing in the real world. There's value to that.

I wouldn't use science as a paragon for moderation, they were involved in a huge vote manipulation controversy just last year

/r/askscience is well moderated.

Within a narrowly defined range of acceptable debate (see: Noam Chomsky)

I feel like I've seen more of the opposite (piss poor moderation) than the good. This is why on your average subreddit, the average quality of discussion is extremely low, with the top comments being low-effort one liners. In worse cases, sometimes the moderators because straight up authoritarian, censoring opposing views even if they're well-reasoned and thought out (any politics-related subreddit).

I'm not defending reddit at all, however to be fair certain topics are almost guaranteed to have very heated comment threads, politics for example.

And 3. Quality Control As problematic as the voting system is, in the end the quality of the contribution is better vetted than any Google result. I often search even for products only on reddit first to get real customer insights and contradicting options than the overoptimized Google and Amazon reviews.

Also, a (mostly) consistent user interface.

As long as you use old.reddit.com.

Do you know if old.reddit doesn't do the horrible trick the "normal" Reddit does when you hit the browser's back button, where it fucking reloads the page or something so you get up to the top of the page instead of to the part of the page where the link you'd clicked was, so you could go to the comments? Specially on mobile, that makes me hate Reddit!! Trying on desktop, old.reddit seems to not do that.

You can just go to preferences and disable redesign, no need to change the url itself.

I'm faintly surprised reddit's redesign didn't kill it, like Digg's did.

There have to be some folks there fully aware of the dark-pattern hell of their redesign, and smart enough to keep old.reddit running to appease the people who appreciate what the old style offers. And I hope they keep it up! Reddit is pretty much the last forum I frequent other than here, and the day they kill off the older version is the day I stop visiting.

And disable subreddits css.

Which contributes to the easy of use/good user experience factor

You don't come there for because "it has a consistent user interface". You come there because "it's easy to use!" (and you find it easy because it's consistent, like you said)

> Creating your own website is an order of magnitude harder

So let's fix that?

I don't know how much easier it can get than it already is.

See https://www.netlify.com/

Basically, just put a bunch of html/css files in a GitHub repo, then use the above page to let Netlify publish that on the net... it can even set up DNS for you so you can your own domain.

If that's still too hard, you can use a drag-and-drop option: https://app.netlify.com/drop

Just drop a folder with your website and you're done.

That seems appropriate for people who understand terms like “continuous deployment” and “serverless functions”, but I thought we were discussing a far, far more widespread audience. Nerds can set up websites with just an ssh password - we need something for the remaining 99.9%

Is there a way for doing that, just instead of using html/css files, you'd use a docker image?

You don't even need Netlify. You can host basically any static sites directly on GitHub. I've got one pure HTML/CSS site, six React apps, and two Jekyll sites running on GitHub Pages.

What are the best current options for 'creating your own website'? Are we talking primarily blogging, or are we seeking a more general solution? As a geek, my first instinct is github pages, but that’s far from user-friendly, as-is.

I guess, if we’re talking about 'creating your own website', we do literally mean any site, not just a limited subset. Clearly, server-side scripting is out of scope, so we're talking content rather than apps - so any form of HTML+Js+css, with a very accessible UI, and lots of 'templates' available for each of the three technologies.

The hard part is getting users to visit.