The funny thing is that I find HN especially useful for non tech news. It's highly biased for tech news, but only the most important normal news make it to the front page, so it's a great filter.
I don’t find HN to be a particularly good filter for general news. It’s got political, economic, geographical, and social bias alongside its topic bias.
But perhaps the more important filtering is on quantity as opposed to neutrality? Perhaps filtering out a large amount of news, even with some bias, is the lesser evil, as compared to news outlets that depend on stirring the emotions of their readers every single day?
Wikinews used to be okay in this regard, but the German version I used has died down a bit, and the English one is even more centered on the Anglosphere than HN.
Sometimes there aren't multiple sides, especially when it comes to science reporting. You have fact-based reporting, and then you have conspiracy theories.
How would you handle news where there is sufficient evidence to show one set of reporting is accurate and relatively unbiased, but another report is all made up and designed to inflame its audience?
That's rarely the case with science reporting. The subjects that are sufficiently rigorous to allow no reasonable debate (the physical sciences) are rarely political enough to inspire unreasonable debate.
On the other hand, the subjects that are politically contentious are not rigorous and leave plenty of room for reasonable debate.
If anything, science reporting tends to err the other way, uncritically reporting sensational results that contradict one other, have not been confirmed, or fail to replicate.
I rarely see a popular science article that doesn't report the results of a single experiment as if they were instantly established fact.
I think you may be on to something here. When it comes to news, none is bad but so is too much. This would be true even if all the consumed news was politically neutral and completely objectively factual and accurate. But of course all news is biased, and much very deliberately so to the point of obscuring the truth of it. LLMs are not going to make this situation better.
I want to be aware of what's happening, but not to drown in it. How to achieve that is not only a good question but the right question.
Oddly enough I had been considering making a similar thread but asking for something akin to HN but with less non-tech news. Perhaps the question that both I and OP are asking is, does anyone know of a site that stays on topic?
>Thoughts? If this doesn’t exist, would people be interested in it being created, and does anyone think it has a chance of taking off
There is absolutely a market for it but it will eventually become a tech forum.
Edit: I apologize for the meta posting, Saturday night, what can I say.
Edit: Prepended "Edit:" to my apology even though it wasn't an edit, it seems more appropriate as an edit. Once again, I apologize for the meta posting, Saturday night, what can I say.
Of the top 10 HN posts atm, 8 are closely related to software, one is about tech but not computers (Coventry Very Light Rail), and just one is really non-tech (My experiment living in a tent in Hong Kong's jungle).
Is that too much non-tech? Or are the tech posts not news-like enough? Or do you dislike side-tracks in the discussions?
I have already asked for that post to be downvoted into oblivion, see my reply to myself. I despise most side-tracks in internet discussion, they have a tendency to become the main track and uninteresting. I don't expect or want HN to be purely tech but I would love it if people would not use upvoting as a like/agreement and use it to make sure anyone who opens a thread does not have to wade through irrelevant nonsense, pedantry, virtue signalling, etc before getting to the discussion of the thread's topic.
People complain about the lack of humor here but it served a purpose.
To those that upvoted me, I appreciate the sentiment but I should have been downvoted into oblivion. Upvotes are not likes, they are curation and moderation; upvote comments which produce good discussion even if that comment is terrible and low effort and downvote those comments you love or agree with but will never produce any worthwhile discussion. Sometimes it it hurts to do but it must be done if we want to maintain quality.
With that said, I have had fun tonight, thanks for humoring me but my previous post really should not be top post. If you feel bad about downvoting it or unupvoting it for what ever reason than just upvote this one and downvote my previous, no harm, nor foul, but lets not have my previous post be top post in the thread and lets make sure top post in every thread is good solid, on topic discussion.
Every time I go there the only threads which have any discussion tend to be AI/LLM threads, so technically on topic but I think my previous post should make it clear I am a humanities sort and as a humanities sort I have certain expectations of the STEM community and expect them to stay on their side of the fence. This seems completely reasonable and fair.
People have made many such curations of HN over the years. I can't recall any names of them or if they still exist but just commenting to say it has been done. Honestly, you could probably just have some AI based chrome extension do the filtering for you.
It doesn't exist yet. I would argue even HN has its bias. For example for a long time anything MySQL or Java dont get much upvote.
I actually want something that sort of combine the both. I want something that tells me what everyone is reading. Because I dont even consume mainstream news any more. And something that is not mainstream but interesting.
I also think the design of HN is a giant filter for 80 to 90% of internet users.
Reddit, but you have to carefully select your subs. And it's not very useful for politics, because it's very one-sided, very far left, and they ban you for any transgressions that don't fit the narrative.
I think that just shows our different perceptions - I, too, see many HN posts as very left. Frequently seen in assumptions about values/ethics/morals...
Update: On further reflection, it is not HN that I am describing. It is the content of the posts that seem to lean that way...
I am outside both of the US parties, I think it is like being sober at a party of those partaking in alcohol. Different perception of the same situation.
Lots of people here favour a lenient regulatory environment and are pro business which seems classically centre right.
Nuanced discussion of things like immigration are challenging though, in all fora I think. I’ve tried to make the point that this is a great opportunity for Europe to pick up valuable American immigrants but somehow am apparently being xenophobic by sharing data of net tax contributions of immigrants by region of origin
... Very far left. How do you measure "far left"? Do you mean they are concerned with all people, and they don't suffer illusions of "I built my fortune on my own" (ignoring all the socialist infrastructure which enabled their success)?
Not "very far left" as in socialist / communist. "Very far left" as in "a large and vocal majority of liberals and progressives" which, when combined with the general Reddit tendency to groupthink and mock/attack opinions that aren't the subreddit status quo, make it a very uncomfortable place to be. (And I'm on the left!)
You won't be able to comment but it will show you what officials, companies and "experts" have said about a particular event. There are a bunch of other features too.
I think it should discard any submissions that are already on Hacker news because it's often same/same. If I think it was reliably different I'd visit it more.
Small, laid back, conversation focused, but the coverage is definitely more 'general.'
I personally find it really refreshing compared to something like reddit (or even here). It's small enough that the comments section don't feel like an artificial jostle for the fastest, most attention getting response -- and the community seems to maintain that culture well via both scale and rate of scaling.
I have considered building this for my own country a couple of times. My general thought was to have left and right areas with submission/discussion a la HN and try to curate a middle of the road point if view from it. But I see too much headache dealing with the extremes and trolls. It would require more passion than I can muster.
It’s not the same but I’ve been using particle for genera news. It’s an algorithmic news aggregator, theoretically you can tune it for your preferences. I don’t use the commentary feature and there doesn’t appear to be a community yet.
Metafilter. Many users here would probably not vibe with that community, since it tends to be very liberal and people will call you out for your bullshit. However, quality of discussion tends to be quite high. (Or was when I was last active.)
The funny thing is that I find HN especially useful for non tech news. It's highly biased for tech news, but only the most important normal news make it to the front page, so it's a great filter.
I don’t find HN to be a particularly good filter for general news. It’s got political, economic, geographical, and social bias alongside its topic bias.
This is very true.
But perhaps the more important filtering is on quantity as opposed to neutrality? Perhaps filtering out a large amount of news, even with some bias, is the lesser evil, as compared to news outlets that depend on stirring the emotions of their readers every single day?
Wikinews used to be okay in this regard, but the German version I used has died down a bit, and the English one is even more centered on the Anglosphere than HN.
Filtering out news with (probably more than) some bias seems dangerous in encouraging echo chambers.
I have been extremely happy to find
https://www.allsides.com/
Especially when it surfaces a topic with three articles from across the bias spectrum, it feels very rewarding being able to get a fuller picture.
Sometimes there aren't multiple sides, especially when it comes to science reporting. You have fact-based reporting, and then you have conspiracy theories.
How would you handle news where there is sufficient evidence to show one set of reporting is accurate and relatively unbiased, but another report is all made up and designed to inflame its audience?
That's rarely the case with science reporting. The subjects that are sufficiently rigorous to allow no reasonable debate (the physical sciences) are rarely political enough to inspire unreasonable debate.
On the other hand, the subjects that are politically contentious are not rigorous and leave plenty of room for reasonable debate.
If anything, science reporting tends to err the other way, uncritically reporting sensational results that contradict one other, have not been confirmed, or fail to replicate.
I rarely see a popular science article that doesn't report the results of a single experiment as if they were instantly established fact.
I think you may be on to something here. When it comes to news, none is bad but so is too much. This would be true even if all the consumed news was politically neutral and completely objectively factual and accurate. But of course all news is biased, and much very deliberately so to the point of obscuring the truth of it. LLMs are not going to make this situation better.
I want to be aware of what's happening, but not to drown in it. How to achieve that is not only a good question but the right question.
Oddly enough I had been considering making a similar thread but asking for something akin to HN but with less non-tech news. Perhaps the question that both I and OP are asking is, does anyone know of a site that stays on topic?
>Thoughts? If this doesn’t exist, would people be interested in it being created, and does anyone think it has a chance of taking off
There is absolutely a market for it but it will eventually become a tech forum.
Edit: I apologize for the meta posting, Saturday night, what can I say.
Edit: Prepended "Edit:" to my apology even though it wasn't an edit, it seems more appropriate as an edit. Once again, I apologize for the meta posting, Saturday night, what can I say.
Of the top 10 HN posts atm, 8 are closely related to software, one is about tech but not computers (Coventry Very Light Rail), and just one is really non-tech (My experiment living in a tent in Hong Kong's jungle).
Is that too much non-tech? Or are the tech posts not news-like enough? Or do you dislike side-tracks in the discussions?
I have already asked for that post to be downvoted into oblivion, see my reply to myself. I despise most side-tracks in internet discussion, they have a tendency to become the main track and uninteresting. I don't expect or want HN to be purely tech but I would love it if people would not use upvoting as a like/agreement and use it to make sure anyone who opens a thread does not have to wade through irrelevant nonsense, pedantry, virtue signalling, etc before getting to the discussion of the thread's topic.
People complain about the lack of humor here but it served a purpose.
To those that upvoted me, I appreciate the sentiment but I should have been downvoted into oblivion. Upvotes are not likes, they are curation and moderation; upvote comments which produce good discussion even if that comment is terrible and low effort and downvote those comments you love or agree with but will never produce any worthwhile discussion. Sometimes it it hurts to do but it must be done if we want to maintain quality.
With that said, I have had fun tonight, thanks for humoring me but my previous post really should not be top post. If you feel bad about downvoting it or unupvoting it for what ever reason than just upvote this one and downvote my previous, no harm, nor foul, but lets not have my previous post be top post in the thread and lets make sure top post in every thread is good solid, on topic discussion.
I think lobste.rs stays on topic (computers and programming).
Every time I go there the only threads which have any discussion tend to be AI/LLM threads, so technically on topic but I think my previous post should make it clear I am a humanities sort and as a humanities sort I have certain expectations of the STEM community and expect them to stay on their side of the fence. This seems completely reasonable and fair.
People have made many such curations of HN over the years. I can't recall any names of them or if they still exist but just commenting to say it has been done. Honestly, you could probably just have some AI based chrome extension do the filtering for you.
It doesn't exist yet. I would argue even HN has its bias. For example for a long time anything MySQL or Java dont get much upvote.
I actually want something that sort of combine the both. I want something that tells me what everyone is reading. Because I dont even consume mainstream news any more. And something that is not mainstream but interesting.
I also think the design of HN is a giant filter for 80 to 90% of internet users.
Reddit, but you have to carefully select your subs. And it's not very useful for politics, because it's very one-sided, very far left, and they ban you for any transgressions that don't fit the narrative.
Should we create a subreddit for this, with a news/politics focus but an hn vibe?
Good luck with that. Their moderation is too insane and not transparent for my taste.
And, considering HN is quite far left, you won't create anything new really.
You think HN is left?
Ha.
HN is at best center-right.
Conclusion: US left is western european center-right. These political denominators are all relative to your local center.
I think that just shows our different perceptions - I, too, see many HN posts as very left. Frequently seen in assumptions about values/ethics/morals...
Update: On further reflection, it is not HN that I am describing. It is the content of the posts that seem to lean that way...
I am outside both of the US parties, I think it is like being sober at a party of those partaking in alcohol. Different perception of the same situation.
Try posting anything right-wing, like government crime stats of black vs white people. You will get banned.
They love to pull up the crime stats but never the traffic stop stats or police-initiated contact stats or use of force stats. Wonder why.
Lots of people here favour a lenient regulatory environment and are pro business which seems classically centre right.
Nuanced discussion of things like immigration are challenging though, in all fora I think. I’ve tried to make the point that this is a great opportunity for Europe to pick up valuable American immigrants but somehow am apparently being xenophobic by sharing data of net tax contributions of immigrants by region of origin
That's simply off-topic. Not sure why you would post that on Hacker News. Most things political simply get downvoted on that basis.
They did say HN is center-right.
Racism = right wing? You mean alt-right?
If you think posting crime stats of all races is racism, you got brainwashed by a cult.
Well, the first comment accurately describes reddit AND it hasn't been downvoted to hell, so you might be right.
Reddit isn't far right, except some esoteric subs either.
Reddit is generally fairly centrist-left for the most part.
Name any far-left position that's not widely supported on Reddit.
HN is definitely left of center by American standards. For example, it's generally anti-Trump, while half the country supports him.
... Very far left. How do you measure "far left"? Do you mean they are concerned with all people, and they don't suffer illusions of "I built my fortune on my own" (ignoring all the socialist infrastructure which enabled their success)?
Not "very far left" as in socialist / communist. "Very far left" as in "a large and vocal majority of liberals and progressives" which, when combined with the general Reddit tendency to groupthink and mock/attack opinions that aren't the subreddit status quo, make it a very uncomfortable place to be. (And I'm on the left!)
This just demonstrates how far the Overton window has shifted in US discourse if one views HN a hive of "vocal majority of liberals and progressives"
My comment was regarding Reddit, not HN. I would characterize HN as left libertarian, in general.
Let's just say that if you got all your news from reddit, you would be very surprised that conservatives anywhere ever won an election.
that really depends on which subreddits you're in!
I also use RSS feeds. A couple sites that are useful to me that I picked up from HN submissions recently:
https://www.phoronix.com/ https://www.neowin.net/ https://kbd.news/ https://betanews.com/
/r/anime_titties on reddit. ignore the name, it helps it go incognito as a better current news / politics sub.
I’m disappointed to find that it is a news /politics sub
If you go to r/worldpolitics, you’ll get how that subreddit got its name. NSFW
I've built https://www.mosaique.info (RSS supported) for this (mostly global news).
You won't be able to comment but it will show you what officials, companies and "experts" have said about a particular event. There are a bunch of other features too.
FARK is one of the oldest and best for “breaking” news and good for keeping up to date on world politics.
https://www.fark.com/
Anime Titties (not a joke) is great for doom scrolling and realizing how fucked everything is.
https://www.reddit.com/r/anime_titties/
Most likely, this is what Digg's comeback is going to be: https://reboot.digg.com
An interesting collection: https://thedukereport.substack.com/
and an oldie: https://www.zerohedge.com/
lobster.rs is good and tech focused.
I think it should discard any submissions that are already on Hacker news because it's often same/same. If I think it was reliably different I'd visit it more.
Ditto on lobste.rs - I’ve found myself browsing it more and more when I’ve run out of HN stories to peruse.
lobste.rs is always called out in threads like this but what I see on the homepage, per usual, is dead threads..
Any good iOS client ?
Safari browser
There is lesswrong, slashdot and lobsters which do have good similarity with HN
If you are willing to slow down, Tildes.
Small, laid back, conversation focused, but the coverage is definitely more 'general.'
I personally find it really refreshing compared to something like reddit (or even here). It's small enough that the comments section don't feel like an artificial jostle for the fastest, most attention getting response -- and the community seems to maintain that culture well via both scale and rate of scaling.
I have considered building this for my own country a couple of times. My general thought was to have left and right areas with submission/discussion a la HN and try to curate a middle of the road point if view from it. But I see too much headache dealing with the extremes and trolls. It would require more passion than I can muster.
The Fediverse, particularly the Reddit-inspired one (Lemmy, Piefed, Mbin). If you want a specific address, try mine: https://lemmings.world
There's https://www.aldaily.com/, though there's no forum. Great articles more from the liberal arts perspective.
https://www.metafilter.com
Long-standing community blog with an eclectic mix of link-heavy text posts. The Q&A subsite, Ask MetaFilter, is also quite good.
wait for new digg, I hope it doesn't turn into a new reddit
It’s not the same but I’ve been using particle for genera news. It’s an algorithmic news aggregator, theoretically you can tune it for your preferences. I don’t use the commentary feature and there doesn’t appear to be a community yet.
Reddit is it. The dedicated subreddits give you what you want.
No way! HN is one of a kind. Sorry.
How about ground news?
Some other:
Ask HN: Sites like HN on other topics?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37611708
Ask HN: What are some communities like HN?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37616919
I've been using "clean news" https://cleannews.fyi/
and add it to my RSS feed. this gives me news articles that dont have hyperbolic headlines.
Comments here and everywhere else are meh. For general news, lite.cnn.com is fine.
Formerly, parts of the formerly free website formerly known as Twitter.
Metafilter. Many users here would probably not vibe with that community, since it tends to be very liberal and people will call you out for your bullshit. However, quality of discussion tends to be quite high. (Or was when I was last active.)