

Ask HN: Somewhere just a little better than HN? - Ben_Dean

I'm not exactly trying to be snarky about this, but basically, there's a subset of content on HN that I actually care much about, what I'd describe as the hard facts and interesting invention components. I do want to read articles from totally disparate fields, but I don't give a damn about entrepreneurship and start-ups as a culture... usually. I want to read technical papers and reporting, I want blog posts on new frameworks and languages and robots, but I could happily dispense with the "My favorite language is better than your favorite language" posts. Simply put, the usual business of software is tiresome, but software and science are not. Is there an aggregator out there for me, momma?
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DanielStraight
No one cares about _all_ of HN. We just all care about different subsets. If
you want your perfect community, you need to find enough people who care about
exactly the same subset of articles as you to support the community and
convince them to become a part of it. Then you need to ruthlessly keep out
anyone who has a slightly different subset, while making sure people don't
leave the community or, for that matter, change their tastes.

Of course, your own tastes will change, so really you need to guide everyone
else in the community to change their tastes right along with you so the
community will continue to provide the aggregation you desire. Either that, or
you'll have to convince or force old members to leave and new ones to come in
that match your new interests.

In other words, you're asking for something which can't reasonably be expected
to exist. The aggregator you want is _you_. Click on the articles that sound
interesting. Ignore the ones that don't. You can't expect a community to
perfectly support your personal, unique, and ever-changing tastes.

~~~
akkartik
Hmm, perhaps I should add tags to hackerstream.com. I think you can solve this
problem with UI. That's basically what subreddits are. In the backend reddit
has just one pool of stories; subreddits allow us (kinda) to configure views
into that pool.

\---

 _Tangent: HackerStream creation myth_

With HN I found that I tended to read a story's comments once and never
return[1], so the odds of seeing a specific interesting comment relied mostly
on whether it was posted before or after I encountered the thread. Now with
hackerstream the odds rely on just whether I am reading when it was posted. A
real-time UI may seem noisier, but if you care about comments it's just as
noisy. And switching between traditional and real-time views is strictly
better than either alone.

Anyway, it's a testbed for exploring a less noisy experience.

[1] Except when notified of responses to my comments - thanks notifo!

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tmugavero
Maybe try using an RSS reader and over time build up the exact things you want
to read. Eventually, you'll have a perfect feed of things that interest you
(well, maybe not perfect, but close). Another option is Reddit, which has the
ability to subscribe to specific groups that show up in your feed. It's
community generated if you would prefer not to hassle with building an RSS
feed library yourself. I find myself coming to HN for startup stuff and Reddit
for more directed conversations about Python or Ubuntu since they are already
filtered and show up when I'm logged in.

~~~
Ben_Dean
hmm. might could. I am consuming HN exclusively through google reader, so
maybe I need to see a little more what it can do for me.

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tokenadult
The displayed links show a user-chosen title (which, to be sure, is often less
informative than the original article title) and a base URL for the source
(which also is often confusing, especially for blogs or newsgroups hosted on
the Google domain). That's enough information to guide my skimming of links to
choose the links to read. If the duplicate submission detector worked better,
I'd be even happier, but I find HN useful for finding what I like to read.

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drKarl
I browse through the titles of the news and read only those that are really of
my interest. I cherrypick the news I read and I find a good think that not all
the news are of my interest because I don't have enough time to read them all.
Sometimes I find interesting articles on fields I wouldn't have researched on
my own.

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akkartik
I recently reread "hot-tubbing an online community", a classic from 1999
(<http://www.calebclark.org/?p=870>), which seems very relevant.

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fogus
A mixture of LtU and Kragen's mailing lists might suit you.

~~~
Ben_Dean
thanks! I do read LtU, and I'll check out this "Kragen's" of which you speak.

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rch
I think what you want is what friend feed wanted to be, but still isn't. Too
bad really, because I'm after the same thing.

