Life & fun · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to Slack + Discourse + StackOverflow = EffectiveDiscussions
Hi, I've combined features from Slack (chat software), Discourse (forum software) and StackOverflow (question-answers) into a single piece of software, EffectiveDiscussions. EffectiveDiscussions solves some problems here at HN that annoy me, and you too I would think: 1) When you return to a topic, how do you find the comments added while you were away? 2) It's hard to find the parent comment, if it's far away. Then, once you've found it, it's hard to find the comment you were reading before, somewhere far away downwards. 3) Downvote because disagree or not? Solutions & demo:…
Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. Slack + Discourse + StackOverflow = EffectiveDiscussions launched in 2016; newer entries below may have overtaken it.
- 1
Discourse 2.0▲291Civilized discussion for your community, redesigned ✨
2018 · blog.discourse.org · its alternatives →
- 2
Commented▲766Simplify feedback, keep your team aligned, no live meetings
2023 · commented.io · its alternatives →
- 3
I built this last year but never posted it anywhere, but now with Reddit hiatus it seems like the right time to give it a shot. The main goal of zsync is to foster high quality content and discussion. That's it. If it can't accomplish that, then to me it is a failure. I watched Reddit go from having high quality discussion in 2008-9 to devolving into the PC meme dumpster it is today [1]. HN still has the highest discussion quality of any "forum" I know of, but (1) it can sometimes randomly be very hostile/toxic to new tech, the most glaring example being crypto. (2) HN is basically a…
2023 · zsync.xyz · its alternatives →
- 4
My partner, Nick Hodges, and I, David Millington, have been on the Internet for a very long time -- since the Usenet days. We’ve seen it all, and have long been frustrated by bad comments, horrible people, and discouraging discussions. We've also been around places where the discussion is wonderful and productive. How to get more of the latter and less of the former? Current moderation tools just seem to focus on deletion and banning. Wouldn’t it be helpful to encourage productive discussion and teach people how to discuss and argue (in the debate sense) better? A year ago we started…
Feb 2026 · respectify.org · its alternatives →
- 5
Dialogs by Slack▲396Build interactive forms in Slack that do all sorts of things
2017 · docs.slack.dev · its alternatives →
- 6
Replyke▲346APIs for user content, social graphs, and moderation tools
2025 · sublay.io · its alternatives →
- 7
I was struggling with navigating HN discussions using existing solutions, so I decided to implement a completely different approach, think of it as depth-first reading vs breadth-first reading. Visually it looks like swipeable stacks of comments and it offers several advantages over traditional interfaces: - Comment width doesn't get narrower no matter how deep in the comment tree you are - You always see the parent of the comment you're currently reading - Swiping allows you to move in and out of subtrees with animated transitions that you fully control - You can easily skip subtrees that…
2023 · apps.apple.com · its alternatives →
- 8
Hi HN, this talk represents a summary of my work over the last four years on addressing shadow moderation with Reveddit. Let me know what you think, good or bad, and I'll do my best to answer. What is shadow moderation? It is any action taken against your content that you aren't told about and aren't able to detect while logged in. I focus on Reddit comments since every single removal is shadow removed— removed comments are shown to you as if they're not. You can try this for yourself on, https://www.reveddit.com…
2022 · cantsayanything.win · its alternatives →
- 9IM
Hi, I'm a high school teacher from Australia and I've built what I'd like to think is a pretty nifty ChatGPT powered presentation tool for teachers. I'd love it if you could have a look at it and give me some of your feedback. I don't think there's much overlap with the HN crowd and school teachers, but I've been coming here for many years and thought I'd post here and see what you all think. Check it out if you have a minute and I'd be super happy to hear your feedback too. https://www.slidehero.ai/ You can jump in and have a play with the tool all you like ;) Cheers, Eli
2025 · its alternatives →
- 10
Lightweight alternative to Discourse written in Nim - nim-lang/nimforum
2018 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 11
Little chrome extension I made to collapse comments on HN, feel free to use it if you want.
2014 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 12SH
I built this tool to help me find interesting discussions on Hacker News. I love reading HN discussions almost more than the articles themselves. However, I found that full text search, although highly performant, is not always good at surfacing interesting discussions on a certain topic -- especially if you don't know what to search for exactly. I built this by scraping the most recent ~6 million posts (that's about 2 years of history) and putting the resulting posts and their vector embeddings into Postgres. Let me know what could be improved, and if you'd like a more detailed writeup of…
2024 · searchhacker.news · its alternatives →
- 13ES
Hi HN, I’m Phil, one of the co-founders building emdash. Previously, I was an early engineer at Facebook and led Customer Products at Square. We’ve focused on making chat and video work together so distributed teams can stay aligned without drowning in information. You can try it here: https://emdash.io. It frustrated us how easily important conversations would happen and then disappear. Slack never quite matched how we worked. Channels were too coarse which led to noisy notifications and broken search. Zoom meetings weren’t much better–unless someone took perfect notes (which…
2025 · emdash.io · its alternatives →
- 14
Bindly▲76Hi HN, I’m a product designer by background, not a traditional software engineer. Over the last year, tools like Claude and ChatGPT completely changed how I work. I started with small internal tools, and now I’m “vibe coding” multiple highly personalized apps. As I iterated between Claude Code (implementation) and ChatGPT (ideation / thinking), I kept running into the same problem. To think clearly, I had to repeatedly re-explain: - what the code currently does, - what changed recently, - and why certain decisions were made. That re-summarization step became a real bottleneck. So I…
2016 · bind.ly · its alternatives →
- 15
- 16T1
HN has some of the best discussions on the internet, but I don’t love reading 100 comments to find 10 great insights. This site analyzes top HN threads with LLMs and summarizes the key ideas, disagreements, and resources — while preserving links to the original discussion. Useful for revisiting old threads as well. Updated daily, manual-assisted for quality, no spam, fan project only. Would love thoughts from the community. https://hn-discussions.top
Jan 2026 · its alternatives →
- 17
Contribute to marcosnils/orange-juicer development by creating an account on GitHub.
2021 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 18
Open source indexing of Discord channels into Google
2023 · answeroverflow.com · its alternatives →
- 19
- 20HN
I'm Seth, creator of discourse.fm, a browser-based tool/platform to create live audio chat rooms. I just launched an extension of the site - https://hackernews.discourse.fm/ - which pulls stories in real-time from the HN site using the public API, and enables anyone to join a live audio discussion about the story (think Clubhouse rooms autogenerated for HN stories). Once you enter a room, you can grab the link generated for a room and paste it back to the comments on the HN story to invite more participants. hackernews.discourse.fm is both a full-fledged product and a…
2021 · its alternatives →
- 21WA
Hey guys, Would really appreciate some feedback on a site we are working on that deals with programming/tech questions with no definitive answer. The concept is that while there may be no definitive answer to "Best X for Y", knowing the pros/cons of the different options and their use-cases is useful when making a decision. We also took a different approach to Q&A and went very collaborative, so one person doesn't have to write everything and we can improve/update it over time. Thanks! www.slant.co
2013 · its alternatives →
- 22
Discourse▲43New open source discussion platform from Jeff Atwood.
2014 · discourse.org · its alternatives →
- 23HT
Hello HN! I'm Supun from Hyvor Talk ( https://talk.hyvor.com ), a commenting platform for websites. First, to be clear, Hyvor is the startup I'm building and Hyvor Talk is the first product of it. Here's how it started. I'm a PHP dev and I did a blog a little while ago. When it came to adding comments I didn't like the options available there for three reasons. 1. Some were not privacy-focused. They collected a bunch of user's data and placed ads on users' sites. 2. Most of them were not modern-looking. 3. Most of them were expensive. So, I created my own commenting system for my…
2020 · its alternatives →
- 24NC
http://mindovermatter.it/ Just a quick and dirty hack I did while learning Go and how to set up an EC2 server. A proof of concept for a feature I think it would be useful on HN. It often happens that I read the whole thread of comments for a discussion, and get back to it at a later time to see the updates. It's hard to see at a glance which comments are new and which ones I already read. The app uses cookies to record the last time you accessed a discussion thread, and modify the html in order to highlight the new comments (the ones added since your last GET of the page).…
2013 · its alternatives →
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Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →