Ask HN: Sites like HN on other topics? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Sites like HN on other topics?

154 pointsbroscillator65 comments

I enjoy reading HN casually, and reddit is too much its own thing and scattered as an alternative.

I'm not looking for any particular topics, more interested in knowing what's out there that you follow.

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A previous time this was asked on HN, someone linked to these, which I quite like:

https://sciurls.com/

https://mathurls.com/

https://techurls.com/

https://finurls.com/

https://physurls.com/

https://devurls.com/

https://hwurls.com/

https://tuxurls.com/

don't need to save all of these, they all belong to the same network, just check their menu icon on top right

So...is that just reddit with more domains? :)

More like digg

They’ll have a urlurls.com for these

This is very neat. I found a new homepage to use it seems!

Somewhat to my surprise, these appear to be getting very little traffic

although I don't know how similarweb gets its data

Omg these links are awesome! Shame I can't subscribe via RSS (or at least i couldn't find the link to it).

Honestly, this is the wrong question, but I understand the intent. What you really should be asking is "Where is the online community for your hobby/interest?"

The thing with HN, is it works for the startup/hacker/tech community, and that community has evolved here over time. If you want a link/topic sharing site for other interests, the answer is almost always going to be a subreddit.

But if what you really want is to be immersed in a community, those communities will be in weird corners that you have to discover. The reason for this is that a community almost always wants to be semi-private: discoverable by others that share the same interest, but just far enough out of the public eye to not get bombarded with bots/trolls/obnoxious people

Some examples I know of:

  - Voron (3d printer)? You want to be on their discord
  - BigGreenEgg (kamado smoker)? eggheadforum.com
  - MMA? sherdog
  - Electronics/Robotics diy style hacky projects? hackaday and go to the comment secion

The cool part about finding these true pockets of a community, is you can learn a ton about what truly makes them tick. What do they get excited about, what do they have an irrational hatred for, etc. If you've ever asked yourself "how do I market my app/website/saas", it's almost certainly because you haven't yet encountered where that niche community resides, and are falling back to more generic strategies. Find the community, and they'll tell you what they want in spades

Yes and no. Yes, you're spot on.

And yet I find that my favorite posts & comment threads here are the ones that *aren't* about tech, startups, etc. And I'm always amazed at how no matter what the topic there's always someone who seems to know what they're talking about. Of course there are always many people who think they know what they're talking about :)

Perhaps it's less "Community about X" but rather "Community of people who are interested in X" as there's more likelihood that you'd have other shared interests? Not sure.

Honestly part of the reason I use HN is the UI, and to me it feels less "community" than something like a forum or even reddit.

When I asked the question I was literally imagining hn but say, about art. It's the mix of "keeping up" with news and people sharing interesting tidbits. I find that doesn't happen often in subreddits I follow either, even if they're good communities.

Not exactly what you're asking for, but a few people appreciated when I shared this last time a similar post came around:

https://brutalist.report/

Nice conglomeration of headlines/links from lots of different sources. Lots of tech and science, but also a good mix of global news. Includes HN actually.

and very centered about America (except Al Jazeera)

Very cool. Thank you for this.

I've stopped following pretty much everything except HN. Which is unfortunate (though sorta nice for my mental health), but my interests right now are also narrow.

I'd suggest Lemmy? It still feels small, and has decent activity for self-hosting and homelab stuff after the whole reddit API debacle. That's where I plan to put more effort once I stand up my own ActivityPub server. Id like to try Mastodon again too but I bounced off last time

Tildes is pretty good. Still small and text focused.

I was enjoying Discuit but then they added images, and now it's just another stream of memes.

I only visit two sites without question each day: BBC News and HN. And that already occupies too much of my day.

I used to follow a lot of communities, but many of them have died out over the years for various reasons.

One of the things I've been trying to do recently is to get out and attend local meetups. The resolution and depth of the discussion IRL can be much deeper. And it makes me realize that most people aren't on Hacker News!

Fishbowl if you are into consulting.

Kind of an old gen site and isnt without its issues, but I feel like metafilter gives me a few good links every day still so I keep it around. They are good at spotlighting stuff that is lesser known.

lowtechmagazine if you are interested in very practical sustainability. Their solar powered website (a 1-board computer on somebody's roof in barcelona) has been a recurring HN topic. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20038619

Fishbowl is pretty neat, are there any technical bowls you’d recommend?

https://stacker.news is the equivalent of HN for bitcoiners and the only one I read daily besides this one...

Twitter is actually pretty cool if you find the right people to follow in the topics you’re interested in.

You can also make lists of such people so they’re separate from your main feed.

It does feel harder to comment on stuff though. Not sure why?

I’ve friends say this but I haven’t figured out how to make it work. It takes so much time to sort and filter and there’s no way to get a proper “feed” without constantly scrolling through crap that’s injected.

I asked a friend to show me and he walked me through their workflow and it boiled down to “spend hours on twitter everyday and some decent percent is manually filtering.”

HN has an easy interface -front page. I can hide things I’ve read and I don’t see them again, or I can leave them to read later. And comments are threaded. Twitter doesn’t seem to have these things.

It's kind of like that one friend who will pontificate on the merits of smoked cinnamon sticks, bitters, candied pecans, and the $10,000 worth of liquor in their living room bar - they've fooled themselves into thinking they're <drinking/using twitter> responsibly and nobly, but it's really just a bunch of mental gymnastics to justify doing <unhealthy thing which feels good>.

You missed a few chapters here mate, Twitter doesn't exist anymore :0

Also see this userscript to "Bring back the peace on Twitter": https://github.com/antfu/userscript-clean-twitter

There are some excellent topic-specific subreddits IMO. Like:

  - /r/ProgrammingLanguages
  - /r/Compilers
  - /r/EmuDev
  - /r/DatabaseDevelopment (disclosure, I run this one)

How do you generally find subreddits? I used love forums instead of subreddits. Subreddits seem to have very shallow conversations and does not have decent explanations.

Are there really any? HN has the quality it does thanks to dang's tireless efforts, and I don't know of any other site with similar moderation.

Not identical as a "users create all content" but hackaday.com (and .io) is excellent for tech stuff. Think DIY meets crazy scientist.

Other sites to follow: https://sciurls.com science https://techurls.com tech https://mathurls.com math https://finurls.com finance https://tuxurls.com LINUX https://physurls.com physics https://skimfeed.com pick category to skim at top https://alltop.com pick category to skim at top

I really like Tildes

https://tildes.net/

which is less focused, more about everything (god I wish I could frontpage an article about sports on HN) but has a much higher ratio of discussions to links (e.g. Ask HN is a joke)

I have invites.

Would you be able to share one invite to Tildes?

Not to be confused with https://tilde.news

Yeah I would love to get an invite too (if you have another spare one)

would love an invite too. cheers!

Would love an invite if you have an extra!

Anyone who wants one should look up my profile and send me an email. I have three right now and they will go to whoever sends me the first three emails. I will get around to it this evening.

Shot you an e-mail :)

I'd like an invite too! Email is on my profile page.

Would love an invite also, if still available :-)

I'd love an invite if you still have any.

Do you mind sending me one? I understand if not since I've been lurking more than I've been commenting, but I really value online forums like HN which don't seem to suffer (as much) from the issues that plague, for example, Reddit, and I'd appreciate it :D

Would you be open to sharing an invite?

Any invites left? Thx for offering. My email is in my profile.

Aviation Herald is, somewhat curiously, something like a HN for airplane related incidents:

https://avherald.com/

This might help https://hn.algolia.com/?q=sites+like+hn

Related, sorting by tags and date https://hackerer.news/

https://www.lesswrong.com/

You lost me because Intercom is there.

https://www.bogleheads.org/ is somewhat similar in terms of active discussion for investing and personal finance. Unfortunately, it’s in a forum format so threaded discussion is a bit difficult.

For bioinformatics:

https://biostars.org

For them intersection of tech builders and bio people: Bits in Bio Slack

https://bitsinbio.org/

Not sure if you can really find something like HN for other topics. HN works as it works exactly because of the topic and audience. Same structure might not work for other things

You can pretty easily for some topics.

I am making digglu.com, which is supposed to be old-digg-like link aggregator site. I would have it out by now if only I could stop procrastinating T_T

https://zsync.xyz

Like HN, with tags. Not many people yet though.

And also yours

https://metafilter.com

Reddit still has some good communities

This is any subreddit.

I can build one if you want lol.

https://lobste.rs/

I'm torn between two sides when thinking about lobste.rs On one side they have imho high quality content. But on the other side they can keep this just because their registration is invite-only. Which leads to fewer/smaller discussions. On HN I don't like everything, but I read a lot more discussions even about topics which I'm not interested in.

I liked lobste.rs but found they were too restrictive on topics.

I kind of like the hacker-adjacent discussions here (notebooks and journaling and reading and whatnot) and lobste.rs seems to block and remove that and there’s no outlet for that type of discussion.

I like they HN, for me, is 80% tech/startup/programming, 10% adjacent and interesting and 10% stuff I just go past.

Do you know where to look to get an invite? I really enjoy the high-level discussion and I want to do more than lurk but its a tough nut to crack, it seems.

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