[hillis]

Discoverboard ( https://discoverboard.com ):

An online community focused on quality, thought-provoking conversations about a broad range of interests. It's a significantly different experience from other online communities:

-Most members choose to use their real identities on the site, and this information is only available to other members.

-Each member pays a small subscription fee, which helps keep out trolls and spammers. The fee also pays for moderators and serves as our members' commitment to quality and respect.

-Discoverboard doesn't display ads to subscribers or sell their data.

Full disclosure: I work for discoverboard. We would be very interested in hearing your thoughts about it. I also just created an invite code for free trials for people on this thread: https://discoverboard.com/code/HN

[mrcold]

I've been wanting something like this for a while. But it looks like your implementation is not that great.

- Using your real identity is an extremely bad idea. Write something stupid once and it will haunt you forever. People will speak their mind only when protected by anonymity.

- The topics and replies seem pretentious. Most likely because of the real identity thing. Everybody just tries to sound smart, eloquent and philosophical.

- Unless you have some truly smart people initiating ideas and discussions, it's just the topic of the day kind of thing. It gets boring pretty fast.

[DanBC]

> Unfortunately, our site won't work on your phone unless you upgrade your version of iOS. We're working to fix this problem as fast as we can.

This is suboptimal.