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 for finding out about new and interesting technology or science?
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...<p>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".<p>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.<p>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.<p>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:<p>- Remove all "drama/politics" entries<p>- Merge entries about the same topic under a single item.<p>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.<p>The HN you once liked is still there, it's just getting increasingly buried it low-relevance contents.
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.)<p>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.
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.
I quite like Alex McCaw's <a href="http://monocle.io/" rel="nofollow">http://monocle.io/</a> - It's quite similar in topic to HN, but with less of the news/gossip/drama stories.<p>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.
Try going to the "new" section and upvoting content you <i>would</i> like to see. If we all don't do that, of course the site will get overrun with stupid kneejerk posts.
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.
On the startup side I'm often finding more things that are interesting to me on the community side of <a href="http://www.usv.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.usv.com/</a>
<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/newest" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/newest</a><p>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.<p>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.<p>Also, <a href="http://pineapple.io" rel="nofollow">http://pineapple.io</a> if you just want cool tech and no discussions.
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.<p><a href="http://hubski.com/" rel="nofollow">http://hubski.com/</a><p>So far it has been very good signal to noise...
<a href="http://discuss.bootstrapped.fm" rel="nofollow">http://discuss.bootstrapped.fm</a> has some good discussion related to bootstrapped startups, and seems to have a good community.
I like <a href="http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/" rel="nofollow">http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/</a>
It is focused on programming languages and PL research
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.<p>The only question is, how do we do it ?
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.<p>How many tags would be sufficient to classify most posts? Startup, marketing, programming, science, politics, ... That's actually a quite hard problem!
I love Hackernews.<p>Here are my additional addictions (in order of preference):<p>* <a href="http://reddit.com/r/futurology" rel="nofollow">http://reddit.com/r/futurology</a><p>* <a href="http://reddit.com/r/linux" rel="nofollow">http://reddit.com/r/linux</a><p>* <a href="http://theverge.com" rel="nofollow">http://theverge.com</a><p>* <a href="http://techcrunch.com" rel="nofollow">http://techcrunch.com</a><p>dying place (although I still read it): <a href="http://slashdot.org" rel="nofollow">http://slashdot.org</a><p>* <a href="http://techdirt.com" rel="nofollow">http://techdirt.com</a><p>* <a href="http://reddit.com/r/bsd" rel="nofollow">http://reddit.com/r/bsd</a><p>* <a href="http://reddit.com/r/opensource" rel="nofollow">http://reddit.com/r/opensource</a>
> 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<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/newest" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/newest</a>
<a href="http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/" rel="nofollow">http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/</a><p>Although it's just programming (the rules say that if there's no code in the link, then you shouldn't post it).
For C++ lovers I find that <a href="http://www.reddit.com/r/cpp/" rel="nofollow">http://www.reddit.com/r/cpp/</a> always has pretty good content.
Theneeds [1]?<p>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).<p>We focus on a broader range of topics than just tech & science, thought there is a good selection about that too.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.theneeds.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.theneeds.com</a>
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.<p>But, it also has some disadvantage such as spammers first attack, moderators are not so active, sometime you can find unusual stuffs.
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.
I'm going to shamelessly plug <a href="http://techendo.co/" rel="nofollow">http://techendo.co/</a>
not as an alternative, but as a supplement. :)<p>We're also on irc: #Techendo on Freenode!
Try <a href="http://www.dailyrotation.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.dailyrotation.com</a> The top 100 headlines turn up interesting articles for many areas of interest.