Ask HN: Is there a Hacker News but for general news? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Is there a Hacker News but for general news?

4 pointsdebt11 comments

Does there exist a ranking system for general news or a place to discuss news online?

I hate to be flippant, but surely you've heard of Reddit? /r/news is the obvious subreddit, but there are lots of others with different topics and slightly different flavor commenting communities.

EDIT to add: Ironically, there's a subreddit dedicated to talking about alternatives to Reddit:

https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/

and here's a page listing alternative sites in order of Alexa ranking:

https://www.reddit.com/r/redditalternatives/wiki/alexarankin...

EDIT2: and FWIW, I know that HN started as an escape from Reddit.

I think on HN there is a pretty widespread culture of valuing the commentary more than the submissions. Some subreddits can be like that but I haven't come across any popular news ones that are.

And PS, if you're less concerned about the content being news and more interesting in a nice community, check out MetaFilter.

http://www.metafilter.com/

That depends on whether or not your opinions match that of the strong hivemind that Metafilter has going. I ended up deleting my long time MF account because of that. If your comments aren't in like with the group think, expect them to get flagged and removed.

I very much dislike Reddit's community. I agree that it is a community around news though.

It's not quite what you're looking for but I've been working on Tracket [0] for quite some time now.

The best way I can describe it is a mix between google news and the wayback machine. It aggregates top stories from the major news sites and groups the articles and photos together if they're related. It also creates a timeline so you can go back in time to see what the top news stories were for a given day.

[0] http://tracket.com

Tracket seems interesting.

That sounds like something I've wanted for a long time: a quick way to catch up with daily news when you get hack from a week or two offline. We used to just look at the front pages of newspapers that had piled up, but online news made that hard. (I suppose a few newspaper sites may still have an image of their daily front page available, but often under a canonical URL with no indication how to see older ones. And often no live links to actual articles.)

The other thing I'm looking forward to from AI is summarization across several articles, i.e. tell me what the 3 days' worth of articles about topic X say.

That's great to hear. That's almost exactly what I'm trying to do with Tracket. Hope you like it!

Personally, I love Fark:

http://www.fark.com

Fark is meant to be links to non-news news articles, but has a large number of links to interesting articles and humorous rewritings of headlines.

I've been a Farker for 16 years.

As far as I know this is the closest - Go to Reddit News and look at the "new news".

https://www.reddit.com/r/news/new/

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