I hate to be flippant, but surely you've heard of Reddit? /r/news is the obvious subreddit, but there are lots of others with different topics and slightly different flavor commenting communities.
EDIT to add: Ironically, there's a subreddit dedicated to talking about alternatives to Reddit:
I think on HN there is a pretty widespread culture of valuing the commentary more than the submissions. Some subreddits can be like that but I haven't come across any popular news ones that are.
That depends on whether or not your opinions match that of the strong hivemind that Metafilter has going. I ended up deleting my long time MF account because of that. If your comments aren't in like with the group think, expect them to get flagged and removed.
It's not quite what you're looking for but I've been working on Tracket [0] for quite some time now.
The best way I can describe it is a mix between google news and the wayback machine. It aggregates top stories from the major news sites and groups the articles and photos together if they're related. It also creates a timeline so you can go back in time to see what the top news stories were for a given day.
That sounds like something I've wanted for a long time: a quick way to catch up with daily news when you get hack from a week or two offline. We used to just look at the front pages of newspapers that had piled up, but online news made that hard. (I suppose a few newspaper sites may still have an image of their daily front page available, but often under a canonical URL with no indication how to see older ones. And often no live links to actual articles.)
The other thing I'm looking forward to from AI is summarization across several articles, i.e. tell me what the 3 days' worth of articles about topic X say.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 25.0 ms ] threadEDIT to add: Ironically, there's a subreddit dedicated to talking about alternatives to Reddit:
https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/
and here's a page listing alternative sites in order of Alexa ranking:
https://www.reddit.com/r/redditalternatives/wiki/alexarankin...
EDIT2: and FWIW, I know that HN started as an escape from Reddit.
http://www.metafilter.com/
https://www.reddit.com/r/news/new/
http://www.fark.com
Fark is meant to be links to non-news news articles, but has a large number of links to interesting articles and humorous rewritings of headlines.
I've been a Farker for 16 years.
The best way I can describe it is a mix between google news and the wayback machine. It aggregates top stories from the major news sites and groups the articles and photos together if they're related. It also creates a timeline so you can go back in time to see what the top news stories were for a given day.
[0] http://tracket.com
The other thing I'm looking forward to from AI is summarization across several articles, i.e. tell me what the 3 days' worth of articles about topic X say.