Hacker News vs Reddit and Digg
Hacker News has completely taken me away from Reddit and Digg. I seldom visit those 2 big news sites as I get all the contents I want on this site. Has it happened to you also?
Relevant to the topic, I've been moving towards MetaFilter lately as it doesn't suffer from this problem as much due to the design of the site, has the bonus of hand-moderation and the $5 entrance fee is a surprisingly good way of limiting membership. The flip side of this is that the content is a very mixed bag in terms of submission quality and topic due to the hugely different styles and interests of submitters - even more so than other social news sites. The comments there are often unparalleled in terms of quality, however, and Ask MeFi is an invaluable resource.
I poked around with Planets (blog aggregators on one topic) for a while but the amount of content is generally overbearing to make it impractical to read them for any great length of time.
I'm slowly but surely warming to the idea that old-style blogs that link to the other content may be a good idea but the question is finding a good ones that are regularly updated, whose moderation you can trust and whose interests align with yours. I do read Boing Boing, Ajaxian and Engadget who follow this format, but I think Slashdot has suffered from it over time by deviating from its core subject matter, has become a caricature of itself especially with regards to its biases and suffered from dumbing down over time. Of course, it's still an open problem as to where they get their content from and how they filter the good from the bad.
Perhaps the conclusion is that the whole concept of a link-driven news site is still largely an open problem - and I'm certainly not sure what the solution is.
Sure, you can go and read a story and then remember to come back and vote, but it doesn't usually work that way. The upvote button is there, the title is there - most people are going to be making the vote at that stage, not after.
Enter my idea: http://con.nect.us/. It's currently under development (it's my senior project at my university) and will be finished by December. My advisor is Tim Davis (http://www.cise.ufl.edu/~davis/), the brilliant man who wrote many of MATLAB's sparse matrix libraries, so I have an excellent mind to tap to help me solve my linear algebra problems.
It goes like this: con.nect.us will track user activity across many different websites, linking your username on reddit or digg or wherever with your account on con.nect.us, as well as take submissions for news itself. It then analyzes what people like and how people are similar to each other and recommend new content accordingly. Hopefully this will help us avoid the curse of the least-common-denominator and start to experience the web better.
If you want to be informed of future developments, there's an email submission form on http://con.nect.us/
Also, the name isn't finalized, so if you think you have a better one, please send it my way.
The rest of Mefi doesn't really interest me. I occasionally look at the front page, but it seems like it's a site for English majors that want to argue about typefaces. For technology-related stuff, news.yc meets my needs.
For random internet humor, I read the comments section in programming.reddit. There is some hilarious stuff there. It's sad that in a year or two, those commenters will be here :(
edit:
This site is the best for startup news. That vibe has almost completely left Reddit and been transplanted here.
The discussions here are probably among the best Hacker discussions that I've been able to find anywhere online.
However, the big plus of HN is the 100% absence of trolls (or maybe I just don't notice them here because they aren't encouraged). The most horrible thing on reddit is several people with technical competence who use it to abuse people - a form of trolling. I find that combination hard work to deal with.
I wonder if a factor is not "diluting responsibility" (psych 101) too much? HN is a smaller site (and has pg overseeing it); subreddits have fewer subscribers; /. has fewer (randomly chosen) moderators. Is too much dilution of responsibility what undermines social sites like Digg?
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* Great stuff on the homepage....ALWAYS something I'm interested in!
* The comment system isn't full of witty comments just said to get karma....Reddit is big for this, and even Digg, even though it doesn't have an overall user karma system!
* Overall, HN makes NEW knowledge, it doesn't just pass on current knowledge - people asking questions, and getting answers, both in submissions and comments, is a massive sign of the quality of the users.
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Long live the current state of HN!
Digg is, well, Digg with all it's failings. Reddit recently turned into 4chan. HN I like as the SNR is quite low but I have started to see posts for things that are less related appearing as the community grows. I've also spotted the same sites popping up again and again.
That said, it's nice that the culture there results in posts that are a few paragraphs instead of the reddit-style single-sentence replies.