[unsupp0rted]

This question comes up every year (I've seen it for the nearly 2 decades of HN), and the answers are never satisfying.

Other industries just don't have an HN equivalent, either for lack of trying or because hackers are good making and using things like HN when others aren't.

[LollipopYakuza]

A psychologist told me a few days ago that they would love having an equivalent for their domain of work.

[qalmakka]

That's precisely why we had forums back in the '00s. there were forums for basically everything under the sun - unfortunately they mostly died nowadays. HN is basically just a forum with a single board that got enough recognition - your average forum had more boards than users and was so fragmented it mostly ended up in instadeath after a few months,maybe years

[chistev]

You could build a HN clone for them for that purpose, but I tell you the problem would be onboarding users.

I built a HN clone for someone who wanted it focused on just E-Commerce discussions, but it failed to take off. Also didn't help that the person wanted to monetize it using a pay-to-use model. It never took off.

[h4ch1]

https://github.com/wting/hackernews

Or use this, rebrand it; but I don't know if people in other fields would be turned off by the aesthetic and simplicity (?)

I remember seeing some green themed website that used Arc as a forum but I completely forgot what it was. Pretty active as well.

[LollipopYakuza]

This makes sense. Community driven websites need... a community. Same reason why it is hard for subs to move away from Reddit.

[unsupp0rted]

Of course: for psychology, various other medical fields, and plenty of creative fields a HN-equivalent would be gold.

But it's impossible without their equivalent of @dang managing their equivalent of a forum of smart people who have a deep allergy to being marketed to/advertised at/BS'd or enshitified at. They need a HN-like immune system, often grossly overzealous and way too self-serious, that actively polices things like this.

That's why there's no HN equivalent elsewhere.

[1attice]

This is the sort of a smug self-satisfied hot take that makes many non-SWEs recoil from this community.

Outside of tech, there are plenty of thoughtful communities of practice, tended by community leaders no less wise and dedicated than dang.

What HN has is YC. Its the financial estuary -- you come here to make contacts, not friends, and you come here to rub shoulders with people doing the work. And maybe, just maybe, have your own work recognized.

You can get those for much cheaper in e.g. a field like medicine, because promotion tends to happen on the basis of long-term deliverables delivered, rather than vibes about potential hyper scale returns a few years down the road. Simply, professionals are constructed as less desperate/opportunistic in other disciplines.

Other fields, like for example those that abut the artworld, are massively and aerobically served by a wide range of venues. Opportunity and curiosity are evenly distributed among them.

But that's not how our game works. Reputational opportunity is the gravity here, and we are all to some degree opportunists here, of varying degrees of success.

It's centralization. Our secret sauce is centralization.

This is both good and bad.

[unsupp0rted]

You’d think so, but then what’s the HN for those various fields?

Their communities of practice tend to enshitify after just a handful of years, turn into professional flame wars on the same old topics, or otherwise ossify into something that just repeats the talking points of the day.

I've been in a number of these communities: you leave for 5 years and come back and it's the same discussions repeated forever, or news posted that's weeks or months out of date. They don't generate, they regurgitate, and slowly.

[sph]

There are plenty of mental cases on x.com