I’ve not spent much time on Hacker News, but I feel Twitter is similar – fairly toxic culture – and very distracting. I’m not sure what the answer is as the TMPDIR community has not grown much (here is the original vision), but I feel there is sitll value for me – kind of an online notebook. I also feel there is value in sharing publicly because it encourages writing, which encourages disciplined thought. I view this forum as “lighter” than a blog post, but potentially much richer than Twitter or other forums where posts and comments are short. I don’t think I’ve gotten a single customer through linked-in. Others have probably had different experiences.
Perhaps the rigor and value of writing might be in the following order:
twitter/linked-in → discourse post → blog → book
If you know of others who might be interested in participating here, please invite them. I hope someday this is more than Cliff’s sounding board.
I still continue to be amazed at how pleasant it is to use discourse – it is very well done software.
They recently released a chat plugin for discourse – hope to try that soon.