Ask HN: Is it time to fork HN into AI/LLM and "Everything else/other?"

> I would very much like to enjoy HN the way I did years ago, as a place where I'd discover things that I never otherwise would have come across.

I've had the exact same feeling a lot over the past couple years or so, and especially the last 6 months. I used to hit the front page and find 5 to 10 stories I was interested in. Exhausting those to read the second or third page wasn't common. Now I find maybe one story I want, and I routinely will scan through 4 or 5 pages (down to 120 to 160) and only find a handful (4 or 5) that I want to read.

I've long found myself wishing for mini-HNs on different broad topics that interest me. Sadly this was the whole point/idea behind reddit. For example, besides the actual and venerable and loved real HN, I'd love an HN for:

1. Politics: Where disagreements are encouraged and any claims are challenged, but only with factual arguments/counterarguments, and any emotional arguments are moderated (basically how we encourage HN comments to be). There have been some reddit communities over the years doing this, but IME they frequently devolve into echo chambers. It almost always comes down to bad moderators.

2. General News: Where stuff that is of broad interest (and not really tech-related) can be posted and commented on in thoughtful ways. Particularly local news would be fun

3. <placeholder>: Had an idea and forgot it as I was making the list. Will edit and insert when I remember!

I've kind of accepted that my dream just can't work (at least, looking at Reddit as the great experimentation of that). People on the internet are just (generally speaking) incapable of consistently humanizing the user(s) on the other end, and proceed to treat others very poorly. Pride and inability to be wrong strongly exacerbate that tendency.

I have a similar process, but usually scan down to 60 (as I did today). I found eight stories including this one and have tabbed them to read. I don't like rust-y koolaid myself, but would never complain that it is here, nor would I complain about seeing the word 'typescript' as it is really far from my interests. To my interest -- excellent AI related white papers, AI agent paradigms and code, model announcements etc. are regularly posted here. Of the eight I picked today, half are AI related. 4 out of 60 isn't bad if I was trying to be an artificial intelligence ostrich.

> There have been some reddit communities over the years doing this, but IME they frequently devolve into echo chambers. It almost always comes down to bad moderators.

In my experience:

Most of them are basically designed to be echo chambers from the start — opposition is only admitted in to the extent that it allows easy targets to knock down. Most people just aren't that good at explaining why they believe what they believe, let along making a convincing argument for it; so all you need to do is set up an environment where one side's position is the default.

There have been a few attempts at explicitly avoiding that problem. They do eventually collapse. But I don't think it's due to bad moderation. It's more that certain factions simply refuse to engage civilly and unemotionally with each other. They will see statements as inherently provocative that the other side genuinely consider matter-of-fact.

I was a moderator for a place like that once. It was remarkable to me how, on the "hot topics" that were polarizing and led to a lot of bans and suspensions, on one side people who were suspended would argue and whine and complain basically as long as we'd listen to them, maybe even the entire duration of the suspension, and they would never get it into their head what our standards were for respectful discourse; and they would even suggest that having such standards was inherently oppressive; and when they got back they would immediately go back to their old ways. And on the other side, people would basically say "LOL, see you on <suspension end date>" and disappear, and come back as promised, and behave themselves for a while.

And while there were a very few people who simply couldn't kick the habit of using slurs or other disparaging terms to refer to identifiable groups of people, there were far more — almost all on the opposite side — who simply couldn't kick the habit of openly insulting the people they were directly responding to. Or at insinuating negative character traits and hidden motivations not in evidence, or other such "dark hinting" as we call it. Or even just of using obnoxious, brutal sarcasm all the time when we expected people to speak plainly.