how to google for real human discussions

Google search has gotten frustrating when you want to see what actual people think about something, not what content marketing teams wrote.

Apart from Reddit, which you can include in your search results like site:reddit.com, I find great nostalgia in looking at older forum communities that still exist but get buried under SEO content.

Most old-school forums use predictable URL structures. phpBB uses viewtopic.php, vBulletin uses showthread.php, Discourse uses /t/ patterns. You can target these directly:

individualism AND (inurl:viewtopic.php OR inurl:showthread.php OR inurl:"index.php?topic=" OR inurl:/threads/ OR inurl:/t/)

Using this I find discussions from smaller communities and niche forums where real people talk about ideas rather than generic content.