<story><title>Ask HN: What problem are you close to solving and how can we help?</title><text>Please don&amp;#x27;t list things that just need more bodies - specifically looking for intellectual blockers that can be answered in this thread.</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>jordwest</author><text>I want to bring back old school distributed forum communities but modernise them in a way that respects attention and isn’t a notification factory.&lt;p&gt;Mastodon is a pretty inspirational project but the Twitter influence shows, I miss the long form writing that was encouraged before our attention spans were eroded.&lt;p&gt;Not at all close to solving it, but it’s been on my mind for a long time. Would love to hear if there are others like me out there and what you imagine such a community to look like.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>101008</author><text>Is this a software problem? There are a lot of open sources (with their differences) platforms. From old forums, to more modern, etc. I think the problem is that people don&amp;#x27;t want or don&amp;#x27;t know how to use a forum.&lt;p&gt;This is based in my experience:&lt;p&gt;- Old people: They started to use internet recently so they are used to social networks (Facebook, Instagram), and newspapers websites.&lt;p&gt;- Young people: Hard to make them use the browser, if there isn&amp;#x27;t an app (Instagram, TikTok), you are lost. If they want to discuss a topic, mostly Twitter through hashtags, YouTubers or Discord.&lt;p&gt;- Adult people: This is where some of them may use a forum, but you have to be lucky enough to find adult people who use internet many years ago, and they know what is a forum. If you find a 30 or 40 years old who started to use internet 5 years ago (which happens), you are lost.&lt;p&gt;And on top of that, you need to compete against Reddit and their own subreddits.&lt;p&gt;(Edited to format)</text></comment>
<story><title>Ask HN: What problem are you close to solving and how can we help?</title><text>Please don&amp;#x27;t list things that just need more bodies - specifically looking for intellectual blockers that can be answered in this thread.</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>jordwest</author><text>I want to bring back old school distributed forum communities but modernise them in a way that respects attention and isn’t a notification factory.&lt;p&gt;Mastodon is a pretty inspirational project but the Twitter influence shows, I miss the long form writing that was encouraged before our attention spans were eroded.&lt;p&gt;Not at all close to solving it, but it’s been on my mind for a long time. Would love to hear if there are others like me out there and what you imagine such a community to look like.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>lonk11</author><text>I am building a project (&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;linklonk.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;linklonk.com&lt;/a&gt;)
 that does information discovery in a way that respects your attention. In short, when you upvote content you connect to other people upvoted that content and to feeds that posted that content. So to get your attention other users need to prove to be a good curator of content for you.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m planning to do a &amp;quot;Show HN&amp;quot; post next week for it and would appreciate any feedback that I could address before it. We have about 4 active users and a couple more would be great.</text></comment>