I am addicted to YC News

The content has the highest signal to noise ratio of any other social content site out there. This is likely because the audience is more focused.

I think the reason that I like to check it a lot is to see what intelligent people think about the things that I say. So the first important component, in my mind, is that the majority of the members are smart. Secondly, by allowing people to reply to replies and assign karma points (admittedly not a novel idea), smart people can reinforce the parts of my replies that they find smart and ignore the parts that don't interest them.

I think the inability to vote topics down avoids some of the problems that Reddit has encountered, where people camp out and vote submissions down in order to make their own appear higher. I think a more mature (on average) user base helps to accomplish that as well.

Finally, I think that most people must have heard of YC news through either pg's site or through YCombinator itself. Anyone interested in those two things are cool in my book, and should produce good discussions.

i have to agree, I find my self checking in many times throughout the day. I never really got into Digg or Reddit because there was so much irrelevancy to the submissions and with so many users it never felt like your posts got much face time with readers. YCom News is focused, comments are honest and not to long, and you get the feeling that the people on the other end are smart and doing really cool things.

The absence of spam and drastically off topic material is a huge plus for the site. We've pretty much stayed on topic, and I think Paul has said they have human moderators whacking bad submissions or comments. The voting helps with that also of course.

its also simple

in todays el-explosion'ary 2.0 scene simple is usually left out

there are no tags, avatars, profiles, subgroups, contacts, thingamwhos and fake promises

I used to check YC News every time I exported a new .swf with the Flash IDE (because it's so horrendously slow and sometimes even crashes the IDE--I figured I'd make use of those 10-20 seconds [which unfortunately often turned into 5-10 minutes of web browsing--AAAA!]).

Now that I've removed that step from my workflow, I check much less often. :-)

Maybe it will get me into trouble at work. If it does, I will just start a starup. Wait, I am starting a startup in any case

I hope they don't actively promote this site. The community is small, insightful, and focused. It should stay this way.

The intellectual feeling I get here is something I really miss from Reddit's early days. Granted, YC News doesn't cover everything I care about, but like startupguy said, the signal to noise ratio is amazing. I just dropped Reddit from my bookmarks bar because I only have so much time and the S/R ratio is falling for me.

i have to agree as well, which is why i thought it was kinda like the new digg, course i dont really read digg any more.

what i find in yc news: inspiration, fresh, new, professional development, stuff to think about, its almost a good excuse for browsing vs say drudgereport,

i see alot more 2.0 newness mentions as well, i usually go to emilys hub for that

it feels more fresh, and i feel like it matters more than random dude check this out digg like stuff

I am also loving YC News - very focused, top-notch content. Hopefully it wont get too popular to the point where we see digg-type spam. I like it just the way it is.

anyone placing bets on how long it will take for news.yc to devolve into digg territory?

(danw, remember I asked this about justin.tv, and the answer turned out to be about 18 hours after I asked...)

I think that vertical news is the way forward, because its focused