Ask HN: What's your web routine? which sites etc. do you frequent besides HN? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What's your web routine? which sites etc. do you frequent besides HN?

Every day, I'm rotating between a german blog (Fefe), HN and reddit. I can't stand twitter or instagram, but feel like I'm missing out on interesting content - other blogs, people worth following, maybe news outside of tech.

What's your web routine?

View on HN

HN has always stood out due to the quality of discussion; evoking a feeling of an early era Slashdot.

Infuriatingly, there aren't a lot of options for other topics.

HN and Reddit here, too. I hit IGN every once in a while (I like their video game reviews). On Reddit, I primarily follow https://old.reddit.com/r/linux, /r/clojure, /r/golang, /r/programming, and /r/technology

Edit: and /r/dadjokes :)

Many folks in this thread are recommending which specific subreddits and blogs they like, but I thought I'd comment on the "how" of my web routine that I found useful.

I use feedly.com to follow HN, blogs, subreddits, and news outlets. I split up "Backlogging" and "Reading" as separate activities, which I think promotes focus when reading.

To "backlog", I browse through my feedly feed of HN/Reddit/blogpost titles, marking the ones that sound interesting to "Read Later".

Then later I read through those "read later' posts, saving the best ones in lists and highlights/notes for the future.

As for specifics,

1. https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/

2. https://www.joelonsoftware.com/

3. https://martinfowler.com/

4. https://refactoring.fm/

Sadly just Reddit and HN. I no longer know how to browse the internet.

I'd say the internet forgot how to let itself become browsed.

Find a search engine, type something in, click next about 3 times, and click the 3rd or 4th link you see.

The Economist, the NYT, Foreign Affairs, a French newspaper, and sometimes The Verge for consumer tech news. Only long articles, not instant news, the latter are usually just noise.

HN and stack exchange are the only forums I read frequently. Reddit has much lower average quality.

Genuine question, have you found a tangible benefit to consuming long form content over instant news?

I find it more rewarding and less emotionally manipulative in that it doesn't get the same initial rise out of me when I read a headline or see an image.

The way news sites / digg / reddit / twitter / you name it seem to be designed is many headlines compete for attention and each is trying to catch your eye and deliver a take home message in the title. I truly think the intent is to deliver a message and hope the reader doesn't dive in to learn about it. That feeds a gratification loop, even before you throw propaganda and shilling in.

Certainly this forum isn't immune either and I notice it in topics relevant to my field but outside tech (which is not my area). "Lowering sodium intake doesn’t help heart patients" from the other day comes to mind with its biting take on a question that is clinically irrelevant for most people unless they are considering tighter sodium control but hey, the title leaves a nice impression if you skim and feeds into some crazy opinions if you already have them.

I've resubscribed to some paper magazines to be able to enjoy them over a cup of coffee to over come this and use a service to send large articles to my kindle. I keep meaning to find a way to integrate it with wallabag.

I don't really care that the Russian forces have advanced 5 meters compared to yesterday. I've read too many "articles" that said "this guy said X, this other guy said Y, <5 paragraphs of useless context that I've also read in the last 5 articles>". It won't help you understand a topic, unless you're already well-versed in it.

Long-forms like the Economist's take a few steps back from the day-to-day news and try to give you an overview of a topic. That's what I'm interested in. You have to make the difference between the author's opinion and the facts because most of the Economist's pieces are actually op-eds, but that's better than reading re-hashed PR releases all day long.

If you don’t Mind me asking: which french newspaper do you read/recommend?

I still read Le Monde because they touch on a lot of topics and are usually honest. But their bias is tiring sometimes, like with the current election. I vote for their candidate, but I'm not impressed with the barrage of one-sided reporting. It's still kind of the French "paper of record" though.

Maybe try Le Monde Diplomatique. They're more critical towards globalization and free exchange, but even if you don't agree with them, their articles always dig deep and leave you knowing the subject. They even have English translations for some articles. Recommended by a history teacher some years ago and I haven't been disappointed.

Mediapart is also interesting for French politics. They discovered quite a lot of scandals that made headlines everywhere afterwards: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mediapart#Landmark_investigati...

Thanks a lot! I had these subscribed but cancelled them a while back; might revisit le monde diplo. Mediapart is new to me.

Not a site, but clojurians slack.

Occasionally eurogamer for game reviews.

Arstechnica.

I too try and avoid sites like twitter, reddit etc.

Never use Facebook.

Be nice if their was a site where you can say I'm interested in closure, lisp, type theory etc and get recommendations on curated blogs to follow.

I don't know what happened to Ars...

But in the early I remember I used to feel smarter having read something on Ars.

Now it's all PR and movie reviews :-/

Maybe Conde Nast happened.

Ars Technica. Not perfect, but one of the best tech news sites in my view (especially their space coverage and their occasional deep dives on a science topic). And its comment section is, mostly, worth checking out. Like anywhere it can get a little echo-chamber-y at times, but it mostly stays pretty civil. It's helped by the story authors and editors hanging out in the comments.

I find Reddit to be really high noise, no matter how selective I get with subs, so sadly I don’t really check it often.

I do also regularly hit up CNBC because I think they do a great job of covering world news and big moves in tech and I check my GitHub recommendations on a fairly regular basis.

I would love more “small HN” stuff - neat projects, old articles/blog posts, and generally just normal people.

Every morning I visit three websites before starting work. 1. HN 2. TechCrunch 3. Gizmodo (They randomly have extremely high-quality journalistic articles)

In addition to those, I often read from the articles listed on my browser extension https://daily.dev/. They have cool developer-first articles

http://readspike.com or directly to hn - scout for headlines i'm interest in

http://news.google.com - headline scouting (use link in sidebar for local news)

http://old.reddit.com - nothing worthwhile to mention

http://linkedin.com - to quick apply for jobs

http://cargo.site/In-Use - design inspiration

http://awwwards.com - design inspiration

http://pluto.tv - see what is on that's interesting

youtube - saved playlists, different tempos for different types of moods/work

Reddit browsing I’ve controlled; anyway I subscribe to very niche subs which don’t encourage comment hordes and meaningless quips etc.

My Twitter feed is a pleasant echo chamber tuned to my literary and cinematic taste (almost zero anything else) and it takes at most total 30-40m a week of my time, or less. I don’t even check it daily.

Then there’s 2-3 mailing lists I’m member of where I read/reply 20-30 mins everyday.

iOS Screen Time feature helps but it doesn’t give a nuclear option - “just block - no extension!”.

Surprisingly HN takes quite some of my time and that too for just “checking” it; and if I am being really honest HN also is the most useless and least significant (in any way) of these all such sites. When I look at it holistically over quite some time it’s really monotonous, insipid, and uninspiring. It’s really a regurgitating mass of comments. So no it’s not the quality for sure.

I sometimes succeed in getting off HN for weeks/months and then it again sticks like a leech that I notice when it’s heavy again after having sucked enough.

Try https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events .

My browser start page is legiblenews which pulls from there. I usually check cbc.ca, bbc.com or aljazeera if I want something less biased (IMHO), and then this site for the first page or two. Once a week maybe some interest / local city related subreddits e.g. fossdroid, longreads, personalfinancecanada, selfhosted. Professionally for my field I try to read through rheumnow.com at at least skim it as a curated aggregator. I add interesting topics for later to wallabag with wallabagger and sometimes send them to my kindle.

I refuse to use twitter, instagram similar to the poster but I would also add that I refuse to go to youtube for most content or news that could be in written form.

The last few months have been interesting enough so I don't really browse much these days. When I do it's usually skimming HN for interesting topics/discussions and sporza.be for cycling news.

Now that I think of it it has not really been a conscious choice to browse so little. It just happened over the span of a few months. I used to spend hours on reddit/twitch and local news sites, bingewatch tv shows but it looks like I don't care anymore about all that stuff and I like it much better this way. I'm either sitting at my desktop working for work/sideprojects, or I'm away from all screens playing guitar, being outside etc.

Financial Times for news (ft.com)

Various sub-reddits for other types of news and info (e.g. r/soccer)

Not a web routine, but general routine: I try to make time to read books.

I have a bunch of stuff, HN included, in my RSS feed that I peruse most mornings. A mix of real news, tech news, gaming news, whatever HN is, and a little bit of business/startup news as well.

I'm partial to the occasional doom-scroll on Twitter as well, especially if something important is occurring in real time (Ukraine invasion comes to mind for this).

Digg

It follows HN in principle in that it is:

1) curated, not by my "interests", or clicks, or browser history, but proper moderation (and puns!)

and 2) doesn't do the ajaxy infinity-load content.

It seems to be impossible to have a quality news source that is both algorithmic and never-ending.

NYT for news.

Hackaday for interesting usually hardware projects. But a lot of articles are covering stuff from a few days earlier.

I try to stay away from Reddit for the most part.

I have an RSS feed of mostly AI and Tech blogs from big companies. I could probably curate it some more.

Reddit, although I'm consciously cutting that one out. Sometimes I'll go on YouTube binges but that's it.

I'm trying to spend less time mindlessly browsing. HN is hard to quit because I get lots of reading material from it.

I suppose we speak not of chan?

Financial times and economist (though mostly their audio content).

Reddit, hn and some niche stuff

HN, Hackaday, Patently-O, CNBC, old.reddit.com I want to spend for Financial Times, but haven't just yet.

HN, Reddit, GitHub, Twitter and Dribbble. Nothing more Nothing less. On the app side, 9Gag to kill time.

Does anyone still read TechCrunch, Recode, Pando, and other early 2010s startup tech news outlets?

Techcrunch has a weird tracking mechanism where you visit an intermediate site before you end up on the main site again and that gets blocked here by default, so I stopped going there. It wasn't that interesting to begin with so no real loss.

A bunch on my RSS feed, the two most prominent ones are: (1) TechCrunch (2) FinSMEs

polygon, rock paper shotgun, cnx-software, TV tattle, few specialized discord, few twitter lists

the player aid, war on the rocks, foreign policy

scripting.com, daring fireball

le monde, el pais, financial times

psyche.co, long reads

How do you find good Discords? I've browsed around because I hear great things and feel like wherever I go there are just young kids (< 20 years old).

the discords I follow are usually niche topics and I found them through 'the community around that niche topics'... they more or less replaced the old topical phpBB forums.

HN, Financial Times, WSJ, the Australian, Ars Technica

Also, current affairs.

Reddit, HN, lobste.rs, tildes.net are the aggregators I regularly visit.

I follow a handful of interesting people via Twitter.

All the rest I consume via RSS — I follow about 380 feeds at the moment. I use Miniflux.app as backend (hosted plan), Reeder on my phone and NetNewsWire on my Mac.

Pinkbike, core77, newatlas. I also subscribe to email newsletters ruby weekly, Postgres weekly, frontend focus and tldr. Important stuff seems to find me. There are some awesome podcasts out there too. Check out ‘13 minutes to the moon’

- HN

- Wikipedia

- Aeon.co

- Quanta Magazine

- FT / Bloomberg / WSJ start pages

I don't remember how I stumbled across Aeon, but it's been one of my favourite finds in a long time! The quality and range of articles is extremely good. IMO it's almost on par with HN for finding well written pieces.

Bloomberg

Twitter

/r/wallstreetbets

Tiktok

Yahoo news

old.reddit.com/r/chicago

old.reddit.com/r/all

news.ycombinator.com

lite.cnn.io

darksky

Genuine question: what do people do on LinkedIn?

Sell themselves and read congratulatory/feelgood bs.

I just keep up to date with messages/requests and I like to see who's viewing my profile.

HN / Reddit

I use Read Something Interesting [0] to find interesting blog posts I haven't seen before (their Thinking About Things newsletter is great too).

[0] readsomethinginteresting.com

Every morning I visit HN, rdrama.net, and the subreddits canada, personalfinancecanada, and my city subreddit. Also Twitch and YouTube, but I’m not sure if they count

- https://www.collaborativefund.com/blog/ - https://topstartups.io/ - https://milkroad.com/ - https://www.reddit.com/

Here, Reddit, and Twitter pretty much. I enjoy the content on some sites (Bloomberg, Financial Times, WSJ) but they want me to pay and I haven't convinced myself to do so, yet.

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