HN Explorer

Ask HN: Where do you get your news?

13 points by edge17 ↗ HN
I used to come here for some marginally curated content, but the curation here has declined. The amount of stuff skipped over because of tiring hyperbole-ridden headlines has gotten pretty high. Maybe you disagree, that's fine; that's not really the question.

I'm curious what other low/high pass filters users here use to get some kind of marginally curated content? Maybe for specific types of news? How do you guys wade through the crap?

11 comments

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nicklaforge
Please, somebody: I'm privy to know as well. I've just visited hacker news asking myself the same. Slashdot by now has become long in the tooth several times over and is ostentatiously geeky and reeks of conspiracy theory; Reddit lacks the level of discourse here. OSNews? Hackaday? 9fans? Lambda-the-ultimate? All are much closer to Hacker News at its greatest, the last probably even greater, but they all require too much baggage of the reader in the way of commitment and even specialization.

Perhaps I'm in the minority regarding my next quibble, but: I don't care about web start-ups. At least, I'm not employed by one, and I don't care to know exactly what Jeff Bezos is thinking __right now__. I like Hacker News for its capacity to impart that fascinating tidbit about technological advances, exciting advances in physics and science, and DIY articles from embedded projects to mathematical nuggets.

Since its decline as an icon, Slashdot is much less interesting than the news section that begins each issue of Science magazine, or any issue of Physics Today. What about Phys.org? Why does it have such a terrible reputation here? Admittedly, the comments were why I always went to Slashdot, and Phys.org comments seem to be made mostly by amateurs and spectators with too much time on their hands (think: armchair Star Trek physicists).

I'm not the only one feeling this way. See these Google Plus posts: https://plus.google.com/116810148281701144465/posts/h95SSbSJ... https://plus.google.com/114765095157367281222/posts/VfmNKPBd...

edge17
I agree, though I think the problem is that this community had decided this site was supposed to be above all the noise. Clearly not the case; that's fine, the guys that run in work hard and don't have any kind of bad intentions. I'm just curious where I can read some news where i don't feel like i'm living in the ghetto and gotta make sure my wallet's not being taken advantage of, or living in the hamptons and make sure my intelligence isn't being taken advantage of.

To be perfectly fair, at this point reddit is kinder to my intelligence than this place. Atleast reddit trashes hyperbole with full malice and no class. This place seems to humor it too often.

nicklaforge
Every 'news' site that comes to mind aggregates content in some way, and by your comments, you seem to be after news aggregation. On the other hand, I think the good news sites also have a sizable membership that shares a certain expertise. For Slashdot, it might have been Linux. For this site, it seems to be web start-ups. Yet, even people like me, with no overpowering interest in web start-up news (though I'll admit to having worked for one), still find a subset of the discussion of interest, and I'm sure this is a side effect of the high level of discourse.

My point here is that it's difficult to maintain that core membership purely through aggregation instead shared interests and expertise. In other words, the quality really comes from the people involved and not the technology for aggregating external links. For me, my go to discussion group was 9fans, which is pretty quiet these days. If I really wanted to find interesting things to talk about, I'd seek out those involved individuals, who of course haven't gone away, but just moved on to other things. I get the feeling that in the age of Twitter and Google Plus, news will become centered around people, and that aggregation sites will go the way of phpBB.

zander1229
Quora is definitely useful if you want well thought out responses and actual discussion.
edge17
Quora has some nice stuff, but it's less of a site that deals with news. I also have no doubt that the quality of the site would go down if their traffic exploded by an order of magnitude... which is clearly the case at HN in the last few years.

No one's to blame of course, content quality (where quality is a measure of honest reporting) and market forces seem to work in opposing directions.

ralph
I visit HN once or twice a day to skim the top 30 headlines for anything that looks interesting; I may click on two or three.

More of the interesting content I read comes from RSS feeds of particular blogs built up over time and, these days, Google+. Now I've built up some circles that match my interests I get a stream that's not too noisy, mute those I never want to see again, and browse the rest. The quality of conversation seems generally high on the posts I like. (I only visit Twitter now to reply to a tweet picked up through RSS.)

My G+ profile is https://plus.google.com/115649437518703495227/about if anyone wants to see who's in my circles.

bjplink
I'm a sports nerd but trolling all of the blogs and newspapers that cover my favorite teams is a bit much. RSS is fine but I like to keep the number of feeds I subscribe to low. My solution was to write my own RSS crawler that scans and saves all of the relevant stories I want to read and sorts them by team and present them in one place. Now I can just go down the list of the latest links and cherry pick which ones look the most interesting by the headline, a short description and an image preview.
brudgers
>"How do you guys wade through the crap?"

I subscribe to the print edition of The Economist.

It doesn't give me breaking stories, and I don't care.

SuperChihuahua
You may also want to visit http://www.trejdify.com to find more articles - but no breaking news. It's similar to Hacker News and hopefully it will stay clean from crap
Wilduck
I don't know if I would keep up with a subscription, but I pick up a copy of the Economist every time I fly. I very much appreciate the information density that comes from articles not focused on breaking news.
Mz
It seems to me that the complaint you are making is rooted in a decline of the community. I do not at the moment have any suggestions for what to do about that but I think it is worth pointing out anyway. I think HN is remarkably well handled for such a large public forum. But it seems to have passed some threshold. I occasionally wonder what can be done about that but I usually do not participate enough to have any clear sense of the underlying dynamic behind it.