>>1
How interesting. I occasionally post here, but why not join a Discord "server" and isolate myself from the people here, all for the low cost of installing proprietary spyware, being unable to use Tor for posting, agreeing that everything I send the company has a license to, and being harvested by a private corporation looking to build a critical mass of users before selling them under the bridge?

People who do this are awful, because they may genuinely believe this is community-building, but it's not in any sense. All this does is help these vampires draw more blood and completely isolate people to strongarm others into joining.

As for programming venues, Lainchan's /lambda/ suits me just fine. I don't think there's currently a superior anonymous programming forum. I'm generally unwilling to create accounts just to participate somewhere, and most IRC are just people idling for long periods of time. I participate in one other group I won't mention here, because it's an offshoot of something strange and each participant is generally expected to be a heavy participant in a way most other forums don't.