For Harmony’s 🧠 AI ∩ 🌳 Crypto projects, which community forum would you like to spend most time on? Interact with most people? Most productive vs most lasting?
So I can discuss news hourly ⏱️ with minimal text (Hacker News) or emoji animations (Telegram). Also, organize research daily 📆 with content embeds (Notion) or image galleries (Civitai). I can broadcast milestones monthly 🌒 with universal emails (Substack) or impromptu videos (YouTube). But something forever 🌟 in the open?
Follow me @stse on Threads.
Some forum access can be gated by tokens like Snapshot’s delegated votes, some by impact like your Github’s weekly commits. Some are linearized as feeds like Twitter or Instagram, some interleaving with threads like Discourse or Discord. Which ONE to (re)build on?
🧠 AI on Github, Reddit
Civit AI, launched in a few months, already has total 10m downloads, 193k reactions, 64k images, 281 creators. See its best models or images (some 13+, some 18+).
Midjourney has 18m users and 1.5m online on its Discord. Huggingface (the Github of AI, named after an emoji) has 232k models, 70 posts, 3.7k monthly active on its Discourse. Stable Diffusion has 325k users and 1.4k online on its Reddit, Google’s Colab and the 25k starred Github repo.
🌳 Crypto on Discord, Discourse
Bitcoin forum started it all. Ethereum Research’s Discourse is the most productive forum with 2.1k topics, 39k posts, 6.5k users, 661 monthly active, 15k likes – along with 5 admins, 6 moderators. Ethereum Magicians’ Discourse focuses Ethereum Improvement Plans (EIP).
ETH R&D’s Discord has 11k users, 1.6k online, while Ethereum.org’s Discord has 38k users, 2.8k online. In contrast, Reddit r/ethereum has 2.4m users and 1.1k online. while Twitter @VitalikButerin has 4.9m followers and 368 following.
Vitalik’s custom blog only has 96 posts. On Substack, Week In Ethereum News by Evan Van Ness is the most popular, while EthHub by Anthony Sassano has 12k subscribers.
Bankless DAO shares plenty on Notion. Our collaborator Hummingbot has a strong trader community with 28k subscribers. Gitcoin has 270k supports and 3715 projects already.
🌟 Hackers on Notion, Substack
All they need is strongly held beliefs, and anyone can have those. No thread about Javascript will grow as fast as one about religion, because people feel they have to be over some threshold of expertise to post comments about that. But on religion everyone's an expert… And they tend to say incendiary things, which draw more and angrier counterarguments.
Which brings us to the most important principle on HN: civility. Since long before the web, the anonymity of online conversation has lured people into being much ruder than they'd be in person. So the principle here is: don't say anything you wouldn't say face to face. This doesn't mean you can't disagree…
… to make thoughtful comments. Thoughtful in both senses: civil and substantial. The test for substance is a lot like it is for links. Does your comment teach us anything
– Keep Your Identity Small (Paul Graham, Y Combinator’s founder) and Hacker News Guidelines
I grew up dialing in BBS for Zmodem and IceChat, obsessing over Usenet newsgroups & FAQs like comp.lang.c++, and writing my own ICQ on Emacs. Then Linux mailing list, OCaml’s, and PL Club. Of course, Slashdot and Hacker News – and finally Twitter with my 4-character @stse.
But more than that. As a community chat app, it gave me an entirely unrealistic expectation of user freedom that nothing that followed has ever lived up to. On Geocities HTML Chat, every user was a god. The powers an individual user had there were not verbs granted by the app, the power was ours, inherent, we could reach out and reshape the matter of the place itself without limitation. (History of Geocities HTML Chat)
Now, Notion has the best content AI uses as well as Discourse’s.
Following Paul Graham’s lessons and jealous of Y Combinator’s Bookface? Look out for Kushagra’s BluePrint and our h.country!
It’s more than a polite request. Amos said that when a company is accepted into YC, the founders must sign investment documents, one of which is its founder ethics policy. Within the policy, there are guidelines around the Bookface forum, including the language: “Don’t share anything in the Forum, or any links to the content posted to it, with anyone outside of YC.” (What happens at YC)
Another aid in maintaining larger batches is a custom software development group led by former Scribd (S06) executive Jared Friedman, which has developed a go-to app that’s a version of Facebook with elements of Quora and a dedicated Wiki. It’s called Bookface. Friedman says that about half of all founders in the YC network check it once a week, and many more get a daily digest of the discussion in their inboxes. Founders with questions can post to Bookface and have an answer from a founder in 24 hours, Friedman tells me. In other words, some random hacker might easily tap a CEO running a unicorn. (Wired)
A long time ago, @garrytan built an internal social network for YC founders called Bookface. He's evolved it a lot since. Today, a YC founder: "Bookface is probably the most valuable piece of software for our company. an incredible advantage for YC companies." (Sam Altman)