Genuinely curious where the best place online to do this is today.
Until recently my reflexive answer would have been Twitter, but [gestures vaguely at the state of it].
Would it be Substack, Bluesky, Mastodon, a personal blog, or somewhere else?
Maybe I'm overthinking it, but it's hard to know where to get started.
> but [gestures vaguely at the state of it]
Everyone wants to gesture vaguely at the state of it but it's still by far the best place. Just use the site the way you want to use it, post the way you wish others posted, and mute stuff you don't like aggressively.
yep, x/twitter is great (relative basis). people will confirmation bias their way to whatever matches their priors though. i spent a day or two marking things as "not interested" and blocking people -- my feed is great: 99% tech niches, 0% politics.
i find reddit to be particularly bad; a true cesspool of negativity. Seems to be mostly just bots and incels looking for someone to blame and/or somewhere to direct their unhappiness towards.
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Xtwitter is NOT the best place to be. For anything unless you’re a horny cryptobro.
It's not all that hard to curate a feed without that stuff. Block people who annoy you, mute words/phrases that annoy you, and follow people you enjoy.
Yeah, and pressing the three dots and selecting “not interested” goes a long way as well
Agree. I ~never see that stuff.
Curious as to why people think this (other than partisan trend-following). I've been on Twitter since 2009, and it's arguably in the best spot it's ever been, apart from Grok being pushed so aggressively. A lot of people still build publicly on Twitter. If you're conservative you can follow conservatives, if you're liberal you can follow liberals. I find Elon annoying, so I just muted his account because it seems like it was being algorithmically pushed, especially during the DOGE days. But I do follow politics pretty closely, and it seems relatively balanced overall.
Not sure if it turned into Musk's idealistic "town square," but it's certainly more interesting than it was before.
So, I suspect the key to your experience is buried in this sentence: "I do follow politics pretty closely, and it seems relatively balanced overall."
Balance doesn't mean much by itself. Doesn't mean "informative" or even "accurate". Extremists from every walk of life screaming at each other might be in balance, but isn't much fun to be around. Note that the person you're replying to didn't even mention politics as such, much less a lack of "balance".
I watched twitter for years, starting in 2007. It was never what I'd call "good", but for quite a lot of years you could reasonably use it to follow people or topics that interested you without consuming an inordinate amount of time or attention. In fact, for most of its history you could do this without even bothering to log in - for a long time, that made it fairly useful as sort of an alert system. And that is long gone, so gone there's a good chance most folks using it now don't even remember (or never knew) that was ever a draw.
What's left is people who are logged in, _engaging_. And man, that was always the worst part of Twitter, the constant posturing and troll-baiting for clicks, pushing every viewpoint toward its extreme.
> What's left is people who are logged in, _engaging_. And man, that was always the worst part of Twitter, the constant posturing and troll-baiting for clicks, pushing every viewpoint toward its extreme.
I do agree that engagement farming is—and has been—a problem, but as someone that worked in social media (mostly on the data side, fwiw), it's been a problem for like a decade+ now, long predating "modern" Twitter. And it's a consistent problem on all platforms (I mostly use Instagram, and it's annoying on there as well).
I'm well aware; I previously worked "adjacent" to this sphere, and a non-trivial part of my work life was spent trying to forestall precisely this outcome.
The difference between Twitter now and Twitter a decade ago isn't in the quantity of vapid interactions; it's the proportion of that to anything else. The slide started a long, long time ago and at some point effectively no one was trying to stop it anymore. I'm sure there are still corners where useful information gets passed on in a timely manner, but like the citizens of so many venues before it those corners have been diminished and isolated to an extent that it no longer feels worthwhile for those not already entrenched in them to bother seeking them out
> it's the proportion of that to anything else
And my point was that, from what I can tell, that proportion of trash::value has been increasing on all social media in (more or less) lockstep. If anything, I'd say Facebook has seen the most precipitous drop in quality, not Twitter. So much so that I don't even log in anymore, and I was veritably addicted during college.
It's increased in lockstep here on HN as well. It used to be that I came here for the comments, but more and more the comments are going the way of everywhere else: Inflammatory, polarising, and more and more botted (both automated and human bots) -- no proof, but I've been around the internet since the early 90's, I see the patterns.
I even get sucked into contributing at times, which is why that descent into trash _works_ so well. I hate it, and I visit HN less and less as a result.
>arguably in the best spot it's ever been, apart from Grok being pushed so aggressively
So the best ever except for one of the biggest crap parts that didn't exist at all just a few years ago?
Though actually I think it's just more people figuring out how the interests of social media companies aren't the same as their own interests, and Musk's very-visible fiddling with things drove home the "people are trying to to addict you and influence you" point MUCH more quickly than anything ever did in the past to a wide chunk of the population. Not new in essence, but now highlighted with a giant neon sign pointing at it.
I think it depends on if your values align with the communities or not. For those that align, it seems fine. For those that don't, it's hostile.
I stopped using it because offensively stupid drivel from morons who paid for blue checks started getting upranked everywhere, pushing down the tweets I actually wanted to see. I have no problem talking to people with different ideologies and political views (actually I tend to enjoy it), but what the site was showing me was consistently not worth my time.
That's because most liberals don't like to be questioned or defend their positions, in general. On X they are forced to confront or actively block people. Note that the your comment is downvoted for essentially saying "twitter is still good" with no malice, and parent is still totally fine after saying (speciously) "twitter is for horny cryptobros". They have no actual response other than to downvote or leave for an echo chamber. This has been hashed out here many time before. Truth does not mind being questioned. A lie does not like being challenged.
Against the grain here but I feel like it needs to be popularised. But have you considered trying to do it in person? Going to shared spaces, meetups, etc and talking to people.
It’s almost a dying practice but I feel it’s massively valuable in a way that can’t be replicated online.
Meetups tend to have huge backlogs for speakers. Tried it in a couple and they said 8 months at least.
I've found Mastodon to be the best platform for this in 2026. If you're working on something deeply technical, there is a good chance the upstream maintainers for whatever you're using and tons of academics in the field will be active on there. Except maybe for something LLM-related, that's still firmly in the Twittersphere, even in 2026.
I think the best way to do this today is having your own site, be it in the shape of a blog, digital garden or whatever and then syndicate, following POSSE[0], in case of wanting community or distribution.
[0] https://indieweb.org/POSSE
Yeah. You can follow microformats and use Bridgy to syndicate to BlueSky and Fediverse
Niche forums are still alive and well.
I run a blog and like to write about projects but it's hard to get feedback there unless you're willing to moderate comments. As a work around I started sharing build threads on places like garagejournal and you can get a lot of good feedback.
I think YouTube can be a good place for it, probably supplemented by a simple website.
Example, Pete's Garage.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xQFlaDhWsck
Hackaday is still pretty cool if you're into technogadgets and the like
For sharing digital creations, X is still the #1 place to do it for visibility and discovery. I get a surprising amount of positive interactions there.
I like reddit, but feel the moderation model is too skewed towards censorship. I created an informational post recently on a niche subreddit and it seemed well received, but then was deleted by a mod with no explanation.
> I like reddit, but feel the moderation model is too skewed towards censorship
I saw that the r/dotnet subreddit banned posting personal projects or "Show r/dotnet"-type posts except for one day per week, and only in the moderator's New Zealand timezone to boot. The reasoning was, apparently, because too many people were submitting projects that might be personal promotion (the horror), and that accelerated with agentic coding taking off.
Seeing what people are building with dotnet was the only reason I used to go there. Without it, it's just an Entity Framework bikeshedding support group (DAE think we should use the repository pattern on top of the repository pattern) where Microsoft's Github projects are promoted by default instead of individuals'.
I’m building a new product design app that is made from the start for design systems and agentic collaboration. Tried posting about it a few times in the UX design sub as I thought it might be interesting to fellow designers, but they all got deleted by the mods for unspecified reasons even though I was careful to follow the rules. Gave up in the end.
Saw the same thing happen recently to a project made by friend of mine (and no, it was genuinely a cool project, and it isn't me trying to tell a personal story under a guise of it being done by a friend; I would love to take any amount of credit for it, but I had zero involvement whatsoever).
The project was basically a wordle-like game, but for chess puzzles. It was focused less on being an actual chess puzzle game (i.e., tricky chess game positions that lead to a decisive turnaround) and more on actually training to improve your blunder game (i.e., each puzzle was more of a "pick a move that isn't a blunder given a scenario from a real lichess game").
He made a post on r/chess, it gathered a small number upvotes, there were a few comments left along the lines of "omg this is so awesome, this is helping my anti-blunder skills a lot, had no idea I wanted this until I saw it." And no, I didn't leave a comment, but I upvoted the post. It didn't feel right to brigade a post with my positive comments on it as a friend, especially given how anal reddit mods can get about this in some cases.
Next thing I see, mods just removed his post with a "no promotion allowed" reasoning. The website had no ads, no paid components, not even a name/profile of my friend attached to it (so no self-promotion angle either; he is gainfully employed and isn't looking for a job). He did it purely for the love of the game, some subreddit users clearly found it helpful, and yet the mods just deleted it.
Do you participate in this community otherwise? People are generally warmer to self-promotion if it comes from someone who posts in the community in a normal way.
Subreddits for other programming languages see the same issue, too much slop.
I don't bother submitting to reddit. I would say if you want to post anything substantial, as in something with multiple posts, to reddit, it should be on your own subreddit. Only allow posts and comments by approved users though.
I crosspost to LinkedIn, Twitter, Bluesky and Mastodon. LinkedIn is the most effective.
I also blog, but POSSE is not as good as it could be.
Mastodon and blog both sound good to me. For some, they could alternatively use twitch or youtube.
I would begrudgingly suggest LinkedIn. I have seen a bunch of professors doing it there successfully. There they also promote their Substack which LinkedIn allows. I remember Elon had banned Substack on X at one point.
Isn't twitch or YouTube live the obvious sort of way?
It's probably still Twitter.
With the real time translations that they just introduced where people are interacting in all different languages now, it's the best it's ever been. The conversations that people are getting to have across Japan, France, Spain, South Korea, etc are really incredible.
I don't know how publicly you mean, but I do this on the maker community I'm a part of (shout out to our general maker newsletter, sign up at https://www.themakery.cc/ for fun links).
I also do something like it on my website, but that's writeups of the finished product. The community gets to see the raw state of what I'm making, throughout the process.
Does substack have a built in community like that? I thought you really needed to get people there or use it for the newsletter feature.
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It was called Twitter for 17 years before being renamed in 2023. The Twitter domain still redirects to roughly the same site it was for all those years.
Why does it matter if someone still calls it Twitter?
Cause X is a stupid name
And twitter isn't?
No, it isn't. Twitter was absolutely brilliant marketing. It perfectly encapsulated what the site was at the time.
X is just a letter the current owner likes. It has absolutely no relevance to what the site does or is for.
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> everyone
Surely this claim cannot apply to all humans who refer to that social media service. There are multiple potential competing explanations that have nothing to do with virtue signalling. For many, particularly non-users or rare users, “Twitter” is a more familiar name. Personally I don’t like the new name; and since it’s not a person, dead-naming it causes no one any harm or offence. Twitter, X - if one’s interlocutor understands that you’re both referring to the same service, what does it matter in casual circumstances?
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X doesn’t even allow for non-logged in users any more, forget about the blatant racism from its owner and occasional child porn. Who even knows what algorithm it uses to show content any more. Anyone still posting there is either wildly ignorant or completely ok with this, and in either case it’s hard to value anything they say.