Where the answer comes from a person

L

Lobsters

Lobsters

Smaller and quieter than Hacker News, with an invite tree that keeps the volume down. The same links, fewer of them, better comments.

T

Tildes

Tildes

Nonprofit, no advertising, and moderation rules that are written down and enforced. Aimed at discussion rather than engagement, which is a rare combination.

M

MetaFilter

MetaFilter

One of the oldest communities still running, paid membership and all. Slow by modern standards, and the slowness is why people are still civil there.

M

Mastodon

Mastodon gGmbH

Federated social networking where the instance you join sets the rules. Its advantage and its friction are the same thing: nobody owns the whole thing.

L

Lemmy

Open source

The federated version of the link-aggregator idea, small enough that the conversation stays in one place. Worth knowing if you liked the old internet.

DC

DEV Community

DEV

A writing community rather than a forum, with a low barrier and the resulting quality spread. Good for finding out what people are actually using.

IH

Indie Hackers

Stripe

People who publish their own revenue numbers, which makes it the only place where business advice comes with a receipt attached.

D

Discourse

Discourse

The forum software most projects end up self-hosting, and its threads are indexed and searchable rather than trapped in a chat log.

D

Discord

Discord

Where open-source projects actually answer questions now, which is a problem as much as a fact: chat is not searchable, so the same question gets asked again every week.

M

Matrix

Matrix.org Foundation

An open protocol for chat rather than a chat product, which means you can run your own server and still talk to everyone else. Bridging is the feature.

LC

Libera.Chat

Libera.Chat

IRC, still the support channel for a lot of infrastructure projects. Text only, no history by default, and that turns out to be a feature for getting a straight answer.

Z

Zhihu

Zhihu

The Chinese answer site, strongest on professional and technical questions and weakest the further you get from those. Long-form answers are the reason to read it.

V

V2EX

V2EX

A Chinese developer forum with a membership fee that keeps the drive-by posting down. Small, opinionated, and unusually good at practical questions.

J

Juejin

Juejin

The Chinese equivalent of a developer blogging platform, heavy on frontend and on framework tutorials. Useful for seeing what the domestic stack is doing.

GD

GitHub Discussions

GitHub

The project’s own forum, which beats a chat room because the answer stays attached to the repository and shows up in search.

AN

Are.na

Are.na

Collecting and connecting things rather than posting them, with no engagement metrics at all. The closest thing to browsing someone’s actual research process.

WT

Wikipedia talk pages

Wikimedia

The argument behind every article, visible and archived. The most reliable way to find out whether a fact is settled or merely uncontested.