Ask HN: Does anyone know of a general news site akin to Hacker News?

36•THENATHE•5h ago

Very small, curated community posting thoughtful political, general, arts, gaming, etc news (specifically not just tech and “nerd” focused) that has some level of commenting functionality?

I LOVE hackernews but I am finding that I really don’t get a lot of non-tech news here (and I understand that is the point) and so I am looking for something to replace Reddit, TikTok, and google news at getting regular stories.

Some things I have tried:

RSS feeds: don’t really see a practical benefit to this over google news

Google News: want to get away from it as I am trying to excommunicate Google from my life as much as possible, and it misses the comment functions

Apple News: not happy I have to pay money for half of it, and the other problem I have is I could give a rats ass about their “curated” stories and audio news.

Reddit: generally, too mainstream and filled with a bunch of chaff I don’t really want to sift through to get to the nuggets, when the nuggets are quite common on here

TikTok: the world news I have gotten on here is great! But often filled with other videos that distract me or are not something I want to actively fill my time with

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 (and not immediately falling to the slop that is public Internet forums)?

Comments

ofalkaed•5h ago

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.

dinkumthinkum•3h ago

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.

ipcress_file•3h ago

I think lobste.rs stays on topic (computers and programming).

ofalkaed•3h ago

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.

ofalkaed•2h ago

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.

jaynetics•2h ago

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?

ofalkaed•1h ago

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.

ksec•3h ago

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.

bufferoverflow•3h ago

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.

rattray•3h ago

Should we create a subreddit for this, with a news/politics focus but an hn vibe?

bufferoverflow•3h ago

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.

fake-name•3h ago

You think HN is left?

Ha.

HN is at best center-right.

bufferoverflow•3h ago

Try posting anything right-wing, like government crime stats of black vs white people. You will get banned.

robobro•2h ago

Racism = right wing? You mean alt-right?

jghn•2h ago

They did say HN is center-right.

lwansbrough•2h ago

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.

CalRobert•2h ago

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

pmdr•2h ago

Well, the first comment accurately describes reddit AND it hasn't been downvoted to hell, so you might be right.

fake-name•2h ago

Reddit isn't far right, except some esoteric subs either.

Reddit is generally fairly centrist-left for the most part.

joris_w•2h ago

Conclusion: US left is western european center-right. These political denominators are all relative to your local center.

michaelteter•3h ago

... 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)?

bpodgursky•3h ago

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.

johnny22•2h ago

that really depends on which subreddits you're in!

dlivingston•2h ago

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!)

jghn•2h ago

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"

dlivingston•2h ago

My comment was regarding Reddit, not HN. I would characterize HN as left libertarian, in general.

udev4096•3h ago

There is lesswrong, slashdot and lobsters which do have good similarity with HN

wewewedxfgdf•3h ago

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.

kamranjon•3h ago

Ditto on lobste.rs - I’ve found myself browsing it more and more when I’ve run out of HN stories to peruse.

d4rkp4ttern•2h ago

Any good iOS client ?

aryehof•2h ago

Safari browser

loveparade•3h ago

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.

OtherShrezzing•2h ago

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.

jaynetics•1h ago

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.

antiraza•3h ago

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.

senectus1•3h ago

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.

chistev•3h ago

Reddit is it. The dedicated subreddits give you what you want.

awkim•2h ago

There's https://www.aldaily.com/, though there's no forum. Great articles more from the liberal arts perspective.

Jordan-117•2h ago

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.

runsonrum•2h ago

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/

blu3h4t•2h ago

How about ground news?

throwaway81523•2h ago

Comments here and everywhere else are meh. For general news, lite.cnn.com is fine.

nikcub•2h ago

/r/anime_titties on reddit. ignore the name, it helps it go incognito as a better current news / politics sub.

stranded22•1h ago

I’m disappointed to find that it is a news /politics sub

napier•2h ago

Formerly, parts of the formerly free website formerly known as Twitter.

ChrisArchitect•1h ago

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

kriro•1h ago

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.

notorandit•29m ago

No way! HN is one of a kind. Sorry.

Rikudou•13m ago

The Fediverse, particularly the Reddit-inspired one (Lemmy, Piefed, Mbin). If you want a specific address, try mine: https://lemmings.world

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Ask HN: Does anyone know of a general news site akin to Hacker News?

Comments