Ask HN: Does anyone know of a general news site akin to Hacker News?

49 points by THENATHE 344 days ago | 84 comments

Very small, curated community posting thoughtful political, general, arts, gaming, etc news (specifically not just tech and “nerd” focused) that has some level of commenting functionality?

I LOVE hackernews but I am finding that I really don’t get a lot of non-tech news here (and I understand that is the point) and so I am looking for something to replace Reddit, TikTok, and google news at getting regular stories.

Some things I have tried:

RSS feeds: don’t really see a practical benefit to this over google news

Google News: want to get away from it as I am trying to excommunicate Google from my life as much as possible, and it misses the comment functions

Apple News: not happy I have to pay money for half of it, and the other problem I have is I could give a rats ass about their “curated” stories and audio news.

Reddit: generally, too mainstream and filled with a bunch of chaff I don’t really want to sift through to get to the nuggets, when the nuggets are quite common on here

TikTok: the world news I have gotten on here is great! But often filled with other videos that distract me or are not something I want to actively fill my time with

Thoughts? If this doesn’t exist, would people be interested in it being created, and does anyone think it has a chance of taking off (and not immediately falling to the slop that is public Internet forums)?

loveparade 344 days ago |

The funny thing is that I find HN especially useful for non tech news. It's highly biased for tech news, but only the most important normal news make it to the front page, so it's a great filter.

OtherShrezzing 344 days ago | |

I don’t find HN to be a particularly good filter for general news. It’s got political, economic, geographical, and social bias alongside its topic bias.

jaynetics 344 days ago | | |

This is very true.

But perhaps the more important filtering is on quantity as opposed to neutrality? Perhaps filtering out a large amount of news, even with some bias, is the lesser evil, as compared to news outlets that depend on stirring the emotions of their readers every single day?

Wikinews used to be okay in this regard, but the German version I used has died down a bit, and the English one is even more centered on the Anglosphere than HN.

ofalkaed 344 days ago |

Oddly enough I had been considering making a similar thread but asking for something akin to HN but with less non-tech news. Perhaps the question that both I and OP are asking is, does anyone know of a site that stays on topic?

>Thoughts? If this doesn’t exist, would people be interested in it being created, and does anyone think it has a chance of taking off

There is absolutely a market for it but it will eventually become a tech forum.

Edit: I apologize for the meta posting, Saturday night, what can I say.

Edit: Prepended "Edit:" to my apology even though it wasn't an edit, it seems more appropriate as an edit. Once again, I apologize for the meta posting, Saturday night, what can I say.

jaynetics 344 days ago | |

Of the top 10 HN posts atm, 8 are closely related to software, one is about tech but not computers (Coventry Very Light Rail), and just one is really non-tech (My experiment living in a tent in Hong Kong's jungle).

Is that too much non-tech? Or are the tech posts not news-like enough? Or do you dislike side-tracks in the discussions?

ofalkaed 344 days ago | | |

I have already asked for that post to be downvoted into oblivion, see my reply to myself. I despise most side-tracks in internet discussion, they have a tendency to become the main track and uninteresting. I don't expect or want HN to be purely tech but I would love it if people would not use upvoting as a like/agreement and use it to make sure anyone who opens a thread does not have to wade through irrelevant nonsense, pedantry, virtue signalling, etc before getting to the discussion of the thread's topic.

People complain about the lack of humor here but it served a purpose.

dinkumthinkum 344 days ago | |

People have made many such curations of HN over the years. I can't recall any names of them or if they still exist but just commenting to say it has been done. Honestly, you could probably just have some AI based chrome extension do the filtering for you.

ofalkaed 344 days ago | |

To those that upvoted me, I appreciate the sentiment but I should have been downvoted into oblivion. Upvotes are not likes, they are curation and moderation; upvote comments which produce good discussion even if that comment is terrible and low effort and downvote those comments you love or agree with but will never produce any worthwhile discussion. Sometimes it it hurts to do but it must be done if we want to maintain quality.

With that said, I have had fun tonight, thanks for humoring me but my previous post really should not be top post. If you feel bad about downvoting it or unupvoting it for what ever reason than just upvote this one and downvote my previous, no harm, nor foul, but lets not have my previous post be top post in the thread and lets make sure top post in every thread is good solid, on topic discussion.

ipcress_file 344 days ago | |

I think lobste.rs stays on topic (computers and programming).

ofalkaed 344 days ago | | |

Every time I go there the only threads which have any discussion tend to be AI/LLM threads, so technically on topic but I think my previous post should make it clear I am a humanities sort and as a humanities sort I have certain expectations of the STEM community and expect them to stay on their side of the fence. This seems completely reasonable and fair.

jemmyw 343 days ago | | |

They banned the Brave user agent I use, for a transgression from many years ago and hasn't reoccurred, and has nothing to do with the way I use that browser. That's their choice of course, but not one I respect - different if it was an ongoing issue. Why don't they ban Chrome or Firefox for their various and more recent privacy violating problems?

ksec 344 days ago |

It doesn't exist yet. I would argue even HN has its bias. For example for a long time anything MySQL or Java dont get much upvote.

I actually want something that sort of combine the both. I want something that tells me what everyone is reading. Because I dont even consume mainstream news any more. And something that is not mainstream but interesting.

I also think the design of HN is a giant filter for 80 to 90% of internet users.

runsonrum 344 days ago |

I also use RSS feeds. A couple sites that are useful to me that I picked up from HN submissions recently:

https://www.phoronix.com/ https://www.neowin.net/ https://kbd.news/ https://betanews.com/

nikcub 344 days ago |

/r/anime_titties on reddit. ignore the name, it helps it go incognito as a better current news / politics sub.

stranded22 344 days ago | |

I’m disappointed to find that it is a news /politics sub

arvigeus 344 days ago | | |

If you go to r/worldpolitics, you’ll get how that subreddit got its name. NSFW

mmh0000 344 days ago |

FARK is one of the oldest and best for “breaking” news and good for keeping up to date on world politics.

https://www.fark.com/

Anime Titties (not a joke) is great for doom scrolling and realizing how fucked everything is.

https://www.reddit.com/r/anime_titties/

wewewedxfgdf 344 days ago |

lobster.rs is good and tech focused.

I think it should discard any submissions that are already on Hacker news because it's often same/same. If I think it was reliably different I'd visit it more.

kamranjon 344 days ago | |

Ditto on lobste.rs - I’ve found myself browsing it more and more when I’ve run out of HN stories to peruse.

d4rkp4ttern 344 days ago | | |

Any good iOS client ?

browningstreet 343 days ago | | |

lobste.rs is always called out in threads like this but what I see on the homepage, per usual, is dead threads..

yakhinvadim 343 days ago |

There's https://www.newsminimalist.com/ where 30k news articles per day is ranked by significance, maybe it's what you're looking for?

udev4096 344 days ago |

There is lesswrong, slashdot and lobsters which do have good similarity with HN

kmetral 344 days ago |

Most likely, this is what Digg's comeback is going to be: https://reboot.digg.com

antiraza 344 days ago |

If you are willing to slow down, Tildes.

Small, laid back, conversation focused, but the coverage is definitely more 'general.'

I personally find it really refreshing compared to something like reddit (or even here). It's small enough that the comments section don't feel like an artificial jostle for the fastest, most attention getting response -- and the community seems to maintain that culture well via both scale and rate of scaling.

msqinfo 343 days ago |

I've built https://www.mosaique.info (RSS supported) for this (mostly global news).

You won't be able to comment but it will show you what officials, companies and "experts" have said about a particular event. There are a bunch of other features too.

kriro 344 days ago |

I have considered building this for my own country a couple of times. My general thought was to have left and right areas with submission/discussion a la HN and try to curate a middle of the road point if view from it. But I see too much headache dealing with the extremes and trolls. It would require more passion than I can muster.

ChrisArchitect 344 days ago |

Some other:

Ask HN: Sites like HN on other topics?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37611708

Ask HN: What are some communities like HN?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37616919

wrs-ai 343 days ago |

The best one I've found is Progscrape: https://progscrape.com/ "All the news that's fit to scrape." A great mix of tech and non-tech news, with plenty of stories that are think-worthy.

more_corn 343 days ago |

It’s not the same but I’ve been using particle for genera news. It’s an algorithmic news aggregator, theoretically you can tune it for your preferences. I don’t use the commentary feature and there doesn’t appear to be a community yet.

senectus1 344 days ago |

I've been using "clean news" https://cleannews.fyi/

and add it to my RSS feed. this gives me news articles that dont have hyperbolic headlines.

Rikudou 344 days ago |

The Fediverse, particularly the Reddit-inspired one (Lemmy, Piefed, Mbin). If you want a specific address, try mine: https://lemmings.world

awkim 344 days ago |

There's https://www.aldaily.com/, though there's no forum. Great articles more from the liberal arts perspective.

aagha 342 days ago |

I mostly get my tech news through SkimFeed: https://skimfeed.com/tech.html

Gud 343 days ago |

I have launched a similar concept as Hacker News, an aggregator for general news. It’s a side project. It’s early alpha. But I think it’s important work.

Link in my profile.

raintrees 343 days ago |

An interesting collection: https://thedukereport.substack.com/

raintrees 343 days ago | |

and an oldie: https://www.zerohedge.com/

Jordan-117 344 days ago |

https://www.metafilter.com

Long-standing community blog with an eclectic mix of link-heavy text posts. The Q&A subsite, Ask MetaFilter, is also quite good.

chistev 344 days ago |

Reddit is it. The dedicated subreddits give you what you want.

notorandit 344 days ago |

No way! HN is one of a kind. Sorry.

Triangle9349 344 days ago |

wait for new digg, I hope it doesn't turn into a new reddit

pronouncedjerry 343 days ago |

I use brutalist.report

blu3h4t 344 days ago |

How about ground news?

napier 344 days ago |

Formerly, parts of the formerly free website formerly known as Twitter.

throwaway81523 344 days ago |

Comments here and everywhere else are meh. For general news, lite.cnn.com is fine.

archagon 344 days ago |

Metafilter. Many users here would probably not vibe with that community, since it tends to be very liberal and people will call you out for your bullshit. However, quality of discussion tends to be quite high. (Or was when I was last active.)

scrozart 343 days ago |

Metafilter, hands down.

bufferoverflow 344 days ago |

Reddit, but you have to carefully select your subs. And it's not very useful for politics, because it's very one-sided, very far left, and they ban you for any transgressions that don't fit the narrative.

rattray 344 days ago | |

Should we create a subreddit for this, with a news/politics focus but an hn vibe?

bufferoverflow 344 days ago | | |

Good luck with that. Their moderation is too insane and not transparent for my taste.

And, considering HN is quite far left, you won't create anything new really.

michaelteter 344 days ago | |

... Very far left. How do you measure "far left"? Do you mean they are concerned with all people, and they don't suffer illusions of "I built my fortune on my own" (ignoring all the socialist infrastructure which enabled their success)?

dlivingston 344 days ago | | |

Not "very far left" as in socialist / communist. "Very far left" as in "a large and vocal majority of liberals and progressives" which, when combined with the general Reddit tendency to groupthink and mock/attack opinions that aren't the subreddit status quo, make it a very uncomfortable place to be. (And I'm on the left!)

bpodgursky 344 days ago | | |

Let's just say that if you got all your news from reddit, you would be very surprised that conservatives anywhere ever won an election.