On The Web, More Isn’t Only Less, It’s Actually Nothing

The filter is aggregators like HN or Metafilter or Reddit, which all have their own flavor and quality. They work fine; you just have to go find ones you prefer, which is unavoidable, since everyone has their own unique definition of "what's really important" or "what you shouldn't miss."

I don't really understand why the guy in the article has BoingBoing and Gizmodo in his feeds if he doesn't like the quality and quantity of the articles they produce. Why would you read a site where only (in his words) "ten or fifteen" out of 400 posts are ones you really care about?

"The collateral damage isn’t so obvious but it’s undoubtedly there. Amidst my 400 unread Boing Boing links are probably ten or fifteen that are probably real gems. But I’ll never know and Boing Boing sure as hell isn’t going to help me out."

I have to disagree. Lots of blogs, such as Boing Boing do help you find the 'real gems.' (see Don't Miss) The author mentioned Gizmodo. They do the same with their header.

"If Samsung comes out with a higher capacity battery for one of their mobile phones, Gizmodo is going to write about it."

True, and as brandnewlow mentioned, this is for SEO purposes. I scan the RSS feed and click through to the articles that look interesting, while passing over the latest battery news.

Finally..not sure what the overall argument is here? Most newspapers have more stories in them (especially on a Sunday) than the majority of people will ever read. Just because it arrives once a day doesn't really change things. The author would like blogs to list all of the previous days posts the following morning? Can't you already do that by browsing archives by date?

I can understand the sentiment but not the body of the argument. We may be bombarded with information, and that's why many of us turn to aggregation sites like techmeme itself to pull out a subset of the news we want, for the quantity that we what. That's why many of us no longer subscribe directly to gizmodo or techcrunch, but to HN or techmeme.

The author may be able to pull out a date in may where techmeme had questionable 'news', but how is this different to the slow news days in print media mentioned in the introduction? Techmeme's job is to provide a page or two's worth of tech-related news a day, just like a newspaper provides 60 pages of world news daily. TM applies it's own 'judgement and discretion' (both with it's algorithm and with human editors); HN does the same.

Such aggregation sites are the solution to the problem, not the problem itself. I personally find that hackernews is a 'twice daily' type product, where a single check in the morning and the evening keeps me up to date with the right dosage for my technews. For world news, I read the Guardian's G24 PDF for a daily summary (http://www.guardian.co.uk/g24). These are solutions the internet provides for the issue of constantly streaming news.

Now if you find that the 'refresh rate' of HN or techmeme etc is too frequent, i'm sure there are sites out there that aggregate in a bi-weekly, weekly or even monthly rate. If there aren't there's certainly a market for it (for the same reason there are weekly and monthly magazine publications). But it's not beyond the capabilities of 'the internet' to find a solution that fits you.

I for one wouldn't mind seeing a "TechCrunch Weekly", which would present me with the top-10 or 20 news items of the week that I shouldn't miss to stay current.

There is a market for the tech-news junkie (read 20 articles a day). And there is a large market for people who want to stay informed, but don't have the time to read blogs hourly, but also don't want to miss on what's really important.

Anyone care to write a filter? How would you know what is important and what is not? (I guess HN is supposed to be the answer).

You have to post 50-100 times a day because Google rewards the creation of new URLs above the creation of great URLs.

The advantages of the new media far outweighs the negatives, and this guy seems to be another case of focusing on the negatives rather than the positives. Is there a solution to his problem? Of course! We all know that. It seems he just has not reached the next level of thinking or searching to adapt to this new environment and make it work for him. I group him into the type of people who feel handicapped by their old habits. Nothing wrong with that. He will figure it out eventually.

If only there were some sort of website where people voted on interesting articles they find to promote them to a front page.

Oh, or some sort of RSS reader that allowed you to conveniently share interesting articles with your friends.

I'm confused. When he starts out, he seems to be saying the problem is that the news is printed, regardless of whether it's news or not. Yet at the end, his solution to 'web overload' is the daily news.