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Ask HN: Did forums solve what Discord and Reddit still don't?

Article news.ycombinator.com

Ask HN: Did forums solve what Discord and Reddit still don't?

I’m part of a small technical community around type theory, and I keep running into a community-platform problem: Reddit and Discord are not really the right places to run communities like this.

Discord is good for quick conversation, but bad as the long-term home of a technical community. That is because technical discussions are not indexed by search engines and useful answers disappear into history. Identical questions keep coming back again and again, pinned messages and FAQs become overloaded, it is hard to organize different topics cleanly and good discussions are hard to link, browse, preserve, and build on.

Reddit is good for discovery and for having many communities in one place, but once you enter a subreddit, everything is basically one feed. That works for some communities, but it becomes messy when you need real structure with different sections, recurring questions, technical discussions, resources, and long term memory.

I also think Reddit is weak for real community building. Old forums had a Presentations/New Members section and local reputation (number of contributions for that specific community) visible in every post/comment and that made people recognizable after a while. Reddit often feels like a hivemind and if I think about it, I probably couldn’t remember three usernames there, while I can still remember at least ten people from forums I was involved in as a kid.

I like the idea of having one central, easy-to-use place where people can discover and join different communities, like Reddit. But once you enter a community, I don’t really want it to be just one endless subreddit feed. I want it to be like a forum, with sections/categories, persistent posts, searchable discussions, local reputation, and some sense of accumulated community memory. At the same time, I understand why so many people moved to Discord. Forums often feel dead, while chat feels alive. Sometimes you just want to ask a quick question, have a random talk, share memes, or see that other people are around. But I don’t need a chatroom awkwardly forced to be a forum. I need a good forum with a live chat.

Basically what I would like to have is Reddit, but the subreddits are forums, and there is a live chat. Does there exist something like this? Do some of you have the same issue? I am already trying to build something to solve this problem for my community, and maybe it can be extended and be useful for other people too, but if there is already a solution for this please tell me!

Discussion 8 comments · 10 points · tolarianwiz · 2026-05-28
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