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

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)?

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 · 6 months 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 · 6 months 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 · 6 months 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 · 6 months 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 · 6 months ago

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

ofalkaed · 6 months 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 · 6 months 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?

loveparade · 6 months 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 · 6 months 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.

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.

ksec · 6 months 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 · 6 months 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 · 6 months ago

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

stranded22 · 6 months ago

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

arvigeus · 6 months ago

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

mmh0000 · 6 months 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 · 6 months 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 · 6 months 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 · 6 months ago

Any good iOS client ?

browningstreet · 6 months ago

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

yakhinvadim · 6 months 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?