
Ask HN: What are some good alternatives to HN? - fabrizioc1
Lately it seems I go to HN look at the front page and decide &quot;I don&#x27;t want to read any of these&quot;. Where do other HN readers go for finding out about new and interesting technology or science?
======
simias
The thing with HN is that there are a lot of interesting threads that get
increasingly drowned in "drama" contents: stuff about politics, the NSA,
silicon valley drama...

See the G+ outrage lately: there are three articles about that at the top of
the frontpage that say exactly the same thing with exactly the same comments.
It's reddit/4chan tier "pitchforking".

The problem seems to be that the community is growing quickly and as a
consequence the upvoted articles are those who cater to the lowest common
denominator and it keeps getting lower. It's a problem all successful
communities face.

The usual solution might be to migrate towards a smaller community as you
propose, but the problem then is that you have to rebuild everything from
scratch over and over again.

IMO a simpler solution would be to make a "meta-HN" which would just add an
other layer of moderation on top of the existing HN:

\- Remove all "drama/politics" entries

\- Merge entries about the same topic under a single item.

Then just link to the usual HN comment threads. I find the quality of comments
usually reflects the quality of the article so I think it would work well for
me. No need to rebuild everything from scratch and rebuild the community.

The HN you once liked is still there, it's just getting increasingly buried it
low-relevance contents.

~~~
gabemart
Alternatively, only activate voting on comments when new users reach a certain
karma threshold (does this exist already?), and only activate voting on
stories when users reach a certain higher karma threshold.

~~~
wavesounds
You need 500 pts to vote on HN

~~~
tfigment
I only have 63 points and I can vote (but rarely do). Actually I can only
upvote. I think 500 is for downvote rights.

~~~
wavesounds
You're right my bad. 500pts to downvote

~~~
pavedwalden
I wonder if that asymmetry is part of the problem. There's a large population
of users who can push junk to the top of the page, and a much smaller
population with the ability to downvote it.

~~~
rosser
You can't downvote submissions; you can only flag them.

------
jrockway
Reddit has gotten better recently, as long as you stay off the popular
subreddits. Pick your 10 favorite hobbies or interests, and subscribe to those
subreddits. It's got to be specific: not programming, but programming in Java;
not electronics, but amateur radio; etc. (I will admit I enjoy r/AskReddit,
which is where people write short stories in response to a prompt in the form
of a loaded question. Ask Metafilter is much less creative, in comparison.)

A lot of people are recommending r/programming. r/programming is why I quit
Reddit a few years ago. It's all "computer-related cult wars" rather than
actual discussion about programming. Everyone goes through that stage in their
programming career, but it's not interesting to read about, and most people
eventually grow out of it. Not r/programming.

~~~
stbtrax
In my experience, any sub-reddits in my interests are filled with incredibly
shallow or meme-filled posts. Never have I once thought to myself 'This
subreddit is way better than [established forum/community] for this'. Maybe
it's the short lifespan of posts, or voting style that promotes
snark/pandering type posts, but I have yet to come across an awesome
subreddit. Also, I agree with you that the more specific you get the less this
becomes an issue, but at that point it's usually just a bunch of ghost-
subreddits with < 1K users and a single post every odd month.

~~~
stusmall
/r/ECE and /r/reverseengineering used to be great... they might even still be.
Honestly I stopped going to any technical subs on that site because given time
they all seem to share one of two fates. Either they devolve into memes and
shallow lowest common denominator post or they die. I've just accepted the
site as a source for shallow sillines and enjoy it a lot more

------
gits1225
Subreddits!

[http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/](http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/)

[http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/](http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/)

[http://www.reddit.com/r/linux/](http://www.reddit.com/r/linux/)

[http://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/](http://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/)

[http://www.reddit.com/r/netsec/](http://www.reddit.com/r/netsec/)

[http://www.reddit.com/r/unixporn/](http://www.reddit.com/r/unixporn/)

[http://www.reddit.com/r/Python/](http://www.reddit.com/r/Python/)

[http://www.reddit.com/r/golang/](http://www.reddit.com/r/golang/)

[http://www.reddit.com/r/rust/](http://www.reddit.com/r/rust/)

~~~
ENGNR
And of course:
[http://www.reddit.com/r/startups/](http://www.reddit.com/r/startups/)

------
jrockway
MetaFilter. You have to pay $5 to post comments, and the comments are
formatted in such a way as to discourage trolling, long digressions, and other
annoying Internet comment features. The material is usually not amazingly
interesting to me, but the community is very pleasant.

~~~
PilateDeGuerre
MetaFilter has remained pleasant for years. Turns out $5 is a big enough
hurdle to keep it sane.

~~~
vcherubini
It's the same with The Something Awful Forums. It is $10 to join, and it
really helps keep the trolls out. One of the best communities on the web.

~~~
Sssnake
What? SA has possibly the worst community on the web. It keeps people out
alright, but not trolls.

~~~
omni
I think you might be conflating the terms "troll" and "asshole." If you show
up to a subforum on SA and start actually trolling people by posting spam or a
bunch of NSFL images or something, you'll get banned pretty much instantly.

~~~
zem
That's not trolling, that's vandalism. Trolling is posting things for the sole
purpose of inciting flamewars, or getting people to believe you were serious
and react with disproportionate fervour.

------
michaelmartin
I quite like Alex McCaw's [http://monocle.io/](http://monocle.io/) \- It's
quite similar in topic to HN, but with less of the news/gossip/drama stories.

It also moves a lot slower, so if you miss a few days, it's fine. Just one
page or so of links will show you all the best from those few days.

------
milliams
[http://hckrnews.com/](http://hckrnews.com/) to avoid the 'never made it to
front page' problem.

~~~
wrongc0ntinent
This. And as was mentioned before, the new page (more crap, occasional spam,
but lots of hidden gems).

------
angersock
Try going to the "new" section and upvoting content you _would_ like to see.
If we all don't do that, of course the site will get overrun with stupid
kneejerk posts.

~~~
ams6110
Yeah, I'm guilty of rarely upvoting (or downvoting) items. Are upvotes on the
actual submission the only driver of where it ranks, or does comment activity
also weigh in? If it does, that would seem to encourage flamewar/ideological
topics to float to the top.

------
t0
[http://lobste.rs](http://lobste.rs)

~~~
benologist
Lobsters has better software but they never got enough traction to get any
discussion flowing.

Apart from that the #1 story is just another stupid adver-article written for
HN. The story is by differential.io and submitted by joshowens who works
there. The same story was submitted to HN by the author with his coworker
joshowens shilling in the comments -
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6741554](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6741554).

This kind of exploitation is happening a _lot_ , "Next HN" will hopefully be
more discerning about its members' motivations.

------
eric-hu
I've found that meetup.com and a free night a week serve as a great
alternative. programming meetups have given me deeper discussions about
software engineering or given me a chance to work firsthand with people in
languages or frameworks I'm curious about.

------
tlo
/. [http://slashdot.org/](http://slashdot.org/)

~~~
devNoise
I still read /. on a daily basis for tech news. Though I find the items that
would really interest me have already showed up on HN already.

------
fcambus
For JavaScript, HTML5, and front-end news, there is Echo JS :
[http://www.echojs.com](http://www.echojs.com)

------
adrianhoward
On the startup side I'm often finding more things that are interesting to me
on the community side of [http://www.usv.com/](http://www.usv.com/)

~~~
reiz
I just checked out the side. Didn't know it before. I found some interesting
content. It's now part of my feedly. Thanks for the hint man.

------
SkyMarshal
[https://news.ycombinator.com/newest](https://news.ycombinator.com/newest)

I figure I only read about 10% of the posts on HN, and focus on the ones about
actual technologies I might use or evaluate. And honestly, that 10% is all I
have time to read anyway, so it works out just right.

The only better option is to go to reddit and subscribe to all the relevant
tech subreddits you're interested in and unsubscribe from everything else.
That's more like drinking from the firehose though, requires more mental
overhead in filtering only the absolutely most useful and relevant.

Also, [http://pineapple.io](http://pineapple.io) if you just want cool tech
and no discussions.

------
ivan_ah
I recently signed up for hubski, which is very similar in style to HN, but
uses a tagging system so you choose to follow only the topics you are
interested in.

[http://hubski.com/](http://hubski.com/)

So far it has been very good signal to noise...

------
potomak
[http://lamernews.com/](http://lamernews.com/)

~~~
cpach
Seems like a nice site, but only two of the current stories on the front page
have comments on them (for a total of 5 comments) :-/

------
davidw
[http://discuss.bootstrapped.fm](http://discuss.bootstrapped.fm) has some good
discussion related to bootstrapped startups, and seems to have a good
community.

------
Tycho
Look at the new page instead of the main page.

------
tephra
I like [http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/](http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/) It
is focused on programming languages and PL research

------
sauravt
I think the only satisfactory alternative to HN, which could attract hackers
and hackers only would be some sort of a termminal application, and you would
be able to browse it through terminal only, that way we could get rid off all
the classy people and hence the drama/politics posts it will be a hacker's
paradise like HN used to be.

The only question is, how do we do it ?

~~~
mandor
We use Usenet? (although I'm sure that there are good GUIs now)

------
ElbertF
[http://thelist.io](http://thelist.io)

------
yoodenvranx
I wish there would be a simple tag system to classify the posts a bit. For
example i am not interested in most startup posts but rather would just see
only programming and technology related articles.

How many tags would be sufficient to classify most posts? Startup, marketing,
programming, science, politics, ... That's actually a quite hard problem!

------
cubitesystems
I love Hackernews.

Here are my additional addictions (in order of preference):

* [http://reddit.com/r/futurology](http://reddit.com/r/futurology)

* [http://reddit.com/r/linux](http://reddit.com/r/linux)

* [http://theverge.com](http://theverge.com)

* [http://techcrunch.com](http://techcrunch.com)

dying place (although I still read it):
[http://slashdot.org](http://slashdot.org)

* [http://techdirt.com](http://techdirt.com)

* [http://reddit.com/r/bsd](http://reddit.com/r/bsd)

* [http://reddit.com/r/opensource](http://reddit.com/r/opensource)

------
DanBC
> Lately it seems I go to HN look at the front page and decide "I don't want
> to read any of these". Where do other HN readers go

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newest](https://news.ycombinator.com/newest)

------
naiyt
[http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/](http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/)

Although it's just programming (the rules say that if there's no code in the
link, then you shouldn't post it).

~~~
hengheng
/r/hwstartups, /r/compsci, /r/startups and a few other assorted subreddits
make for a nice complement to HN.

~~~
drakethes
With the use of multi reddits I've found you can build up quite a nice suite
of multireddits which supplements hackernews nicely, though you do tend to see
quite a lot of cross posting of articles.

------
modi0er
[http://secletter.com/](http://secletter.com/)

------
en4bz
For C++ lovers I find that
[http://www.reddit.com/r/cpp/](http://www.reddit.com/r/cpp/) always has pretty
good content.

------
ecesena
Theneeds [1]?

We built Theneeds with a similar idea in mind, that people should come and
just find interesting stuff, personalized according to their interests (we
learn from users' activity to get smarter about what the interests really
are).

We focus on a broader range of topics than just tech & science, thought there
is a good selection about that too.

[1] [http://www.theneeds.com](http://www.theneeds.com)

~~~
wdewind
I tried your site out, it's pretty cool but some of the backgrounds make it
completely unusable. Make it as minimal as possible, people are meant to stare
at this for a long time.

~~~
ecesena
Thanks for trying and for the feedback!

The background can be turned off, but we actually decided to keep it on by
default. We think that it creates a more "full-immersion" experience and helps
not going OT (out of need actually ;). We don't have numbers to support this,
but... that's the idea!

------
japaget
Techmeme river: [http://www.techmeme.com/river](http://www.techmeme.com/river)

------
Gaurav322
Reddit is the best alternative of HN and the most favorable thing of this
community is that it has sub communities such as Technology, Programming,etc.
not like HN.

But, it also has some disadvantage such as spammers first attack, moderators
are not so active, sometime you can find unusual stuffs.

------
dsaber
[http://devmaster.net](http://devmaster.net) for game development

------
debacle
I've been spending more time in the technology dedicated subreddits. While the
general content is lesser than HN was ~1 year ago, it's more on topic. I only
see 3-4 stories a day on HN worth reading, which honestly is nice because it
limits my browsing time.

------
Kluny
Quora is quite good.

------
Sambdala
[http://hn4hn4x.herokuapp.com](http://hn4hn4x.herokuapp.com)

------
lowglow
I'm going to shamelessly plug [http://techendo.co/](http://techendo.co/) not
as an alternative, but as a supplement. :)

We're also on irc: #Techendo on Freenode!

------
TomBeckman
Try [http://www.dailyrotation.com](http://www.dailyrotation.com) The top 100
headlines turn up interesting articles for many areas of interest.

------
SanderMak
If you are into JavaScript, [http://echojs.com](http://echojs.com) is pretty
good.

------
himal
Almost missed this post becasue this is one of my "I don't want to read any of
these" titles.

------
adamzerner
There's a huge demand for quality content.

Why not just hire a bunch of people with taste to choose the content?

------
Misiek
[http://www.dzone.com](http://www.dzone.com)

------
Datsundere
/g/technology

------
smoyer
We need sub-HNs!

------
joeyh
mailing lists

irc

------
alg0rith
HackerJews.com

~~~
xinkr
Where is it possible to find the Hacker News theme btw?

