

Ask HN: Where do you get your news? - edge17

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.<p>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?
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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/116810148281701144465/posts/h95SSbSJWQH)
[https://plus.google.com/114765095157367281222/posts/VfmNKPBd...](https://plus.google.com/114765095157367281222/posts/VfmNKPBdBbJ)

~~~
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.

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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.

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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.

~~~
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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

