Ask HN: Somewhere just a little better than HN? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Somewhere just a little better than HN?

8 pointsBen_Dean11 comments

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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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.

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.

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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!

To Long, Didn't Read: I'm down with what you're saying, but I didn't ask that question. Where's the hot links?

Yes yes, I've asked ever so foolish a question and missed the fundamental problem, really failed to develop an overall understanding of the root causes of my interests and their dynamic nature, and lack a general theory of communication.

That, or, I had hoped that the widely read and interesting people who take the time to read arbitrary questions from strangers and give coherent, considered replies might direct me towards exactly the thing that I described: an internet content aggregator that is, in aggregate, more focussed on the technical and aesthetic issues, and less concerned with embedding those issues within a specific economic framework? A specific one that I can point ol' Chrome at?

More science, less startup. That's all I'm askin'. I do not care what Steve Jobs said to a guy who's iPhone was too beepy. I do care that a professor at MIT has claimed he's got a widget to beat photosynthesis, and I do care that someone's unearthed a video of bookbinding as practiced in 1947.

Certainly, I appreciate that I would be doing myself a disservice if I insisted that all I read, watched, or heard were something that I had already approved. I have no expectations that a community perfectly support anything. The nice thing about HN as a community is that I can ask this question, and perhaps find a supplementary community to address the imbalance that I personally experience. Also, I'm calling startup kids dorks cause I think it's dorky.

--Summer Glau

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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