Ask YC: Why do we read so many different sites for the same news? | Hacker News Reader

Ask YC: Why do we read so many different sites for the same news?

7 pointsgsiener18 comments

Wouldn't it be more useful to have one site that could aggregate these articles across the popular sites and make sub-sites when something reaches a critical mass? I think I recall a startup that tried doing this a few years ago by making the discussion happen on the site. Is anyone working on this? Do any of you do this already with some program/site?

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This is more or less, what Google News is doing. :-)

The reason I visit certain sites is for the community, not the news. Slashdot was good, then reddit, then programming.reddit, and now n.yc. They all carry similar news, but the people are what make me come and go.

The next big site could be www.dzone.com. They have a bunch of good stories, but unfortunately no community. Everything of interest there gets cross posted to programming.reddit and here, and I think they generally have it first.

Wouldn't it be nice if you could get the community no matter the story source? Maybe it's my fomo (fear of missing out) but when I'm interested in an event/article I find myself digging around to find more info/commentary

It would. Although nowadays, I'd prefer to not see the commentary from reddit on anything that gets psoted here. It just isn't my cup of tea any more.

How much do you miss if you only read news.YC? I don't really frequent any other news sites at the moment.

heh, you miss quite a lot.

i hit rawstory for political news, digg for general news (yea i know), and then YC for venture/tech news.

in fact, the main reason i like this so much is the discussion/comments. everyone is very mature, there aren't that many users, and people will generally give good advice/feedback (meaning they say it's good if it is and if it is not they say why).

I think lots of people would really dig that idea. Years from now, they'll think of your comment and wish they'd read it earlier. I hope some hacker comes up with a news source like that. It would be a delicious accomplishment we'd all savor.

Do you remember the name of the startup that you said have tried this a few years ago?

I don't, but I seem to remember that they were European and at their release wore all white or something flashy...

I'm doing just exactly that. Kitchen table status yet, but hopefully I'll have a beta with the new year. If you want to know additional details drop me a line: abarrera at neurosecurity dot com

Maybe each site adds something interesting and new like the publisher's opinion, it's the same thing with newspapers and magazines.

This is one of those ideas that has been floating around in the group collective. I know I was in discussions about something like this a few months ago. If you can do it, go for it. It'd be great.

I also toyed with an idea like this at some point, but it seemed to me that aggregating the big 4 or 5 aggregators is unnecessary, while aggregating much more than that (something like Techmeme but broad-based?) takes you into Google/Technorati territory, fairly large scale processing and intensive ML stuff. There are also quite a few RSS-filtering/recommending startups out there already.

I do have the feeling there is an angle I was missing though, and I'd be glad to be proved wrong!

My main thought is that those solutions aren't really creating a dialog. Sure they're bring users to that site, but it seems hard to connect all the different discussion points with an event. A great example would be the drama this summer over PG's comments re: age, or all the hoopla around twitter's scaling issues.

Ah yes, somehow integrating scattered networks of conversation around distinct, emerging topics, that's a good angle (though at its simplest, a lot like a meta-techmeme?). Sounds like a lot of hard work to get it right, I too wish I had time to play around with the idea some more. I think one approach I considered was something like digg or reddit, but where user input is geared toward collecting, connecting and filtering around 'stories'. Defining what a story is, and where one beings and another ends is the fun part, though I suppose in the extreme cases quite doable.

I wonder if something like this could be built in a kinda of open source like way - make a wiki or something for ideas how to solve the problem, see if anyone wants to work on it, maybe use a pledge thing to raise money for servers when that starts to matter, that sort of thing... but that's another post.

Well, I'd love to do it but am lacking the time. Plus I actually like my job (go figure). Any thoughts?

popurls.com

Really? Good idea. Here's my idea:

I finally have time to do what I've always wanted: write the great American novel. Mine is about a futuristic amusement park where dinosaurs are brought to life through advanced cloning techniques. I call it "Billy and the Cloneasaurus"

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