Hey teminalists, where do you get your tech news (or news in general) these days. Just curious where do you guys spend your time online other than here. There are many communities and geek news aggregators out there but the biggest and most popular ones are probably these four:
- Digg
- Slashdot
- Boingboing
Do you visit any of them? Or all of them? Personally, I spend most of my time on Reddit because it tends to have the best signal to noise ratio without actually employing all powerful editors that hand pick best submissions. Of course there is a downside to this. On some days the front page of Reddit looks like this:
Yes, I posted a FUUUU joke. Se me
Then again sometimes Reddit is incredibly awesome. For example, some time ago I submitted a theoretical question involving special relativity and use of ansibles to the science subreddit and actually got some serious and thoughtful responses. The question received 17 upvotes and 6 downvotes but still generated a rather interesting theoretical discussion in the comments. The only other place on the interwebs where I could ask such a question and actually get replies is… Well, here. So that’s why I like Reddit. Like minded folks and good content.
I also visit Slashdot and Boingboing from time to time as well. Especially on the days when Reddit turns into 4chan meme recycling mill. I hardly ever go to Digg though… Which is probably a side effect of hinging out at Reddit so much. How about you guys? Where do you spend your time? Feel free to pimp out your favorite geek news and trivia sources in the comments.
Btw, as a rule I do not subscribe to RSS feed from any of these sites. I subscribe to blogs and online comic strips but not news aggregators. I access those the old fashioned way by going to the website and/or clicking refresh. Why? Because these sites have astonishing output rates. I tried subscribing to them once, and I could never keep up with their pace. After just a few days I would have 1000+ unread articles in each of the feeds (half of them probably dupes). Whenever I managed to clear one of these piles, new articles would start piling up within hours. It just doesn’t work.
I like the irony of using a FFFFUUUU comic to explain how dumb reddit can be. :-) Also, your description of why RSS doesn’t work on these sites is spot on. I have around 100 feeds listed in my RSS reader, but none of them are reddit or Slashdot.
For about 6 years there I used only Slashdot, but a few months ago I started replacing it with more and more time on reddit, such that I only visit Slashdot on occasion now. I think reddit is a bit more conductive to dialog, as your anecdote demonstrated, and it has the advantage of having a much broader range of topics, though I still tend to stick to the technical subreddits.
Oh, and reddit is a markedly cleaner website overall. Slashdot over the last couple years has tried to bolt on some Web 2.0 and it’s a nasty mess. I’ve managed tame it well enough with a careful selection of settings and Greasemonkey scripts, but it’s a really fragile set up.
However, Slashdot is still much, much better at delivering technical news and I haven’t been able to completely replace it with reddit. The Slashdot moderation system generates really high signal-to-noise ratio that no one else seems to be able to match (but this might have a lot to do with it only attracting an educated technically-minded user base).
What would be really great would be if there was a subreddit that automatically and only contained Slashdot posts. Ideally, some bot would watch the Slashdot RSS feed and post whatever comes out of it.
I sometimes use Reddit. Hacker News is cool too.
But I don’t spend much time on these sites : there is too much volume. It’s easier for me to get only what I want using RSS/Atom.
Digg still has tech news? I left years ago because it was all crap. BoingBoing is so cluttered and there is too much low value content to sift through. Slashdot is good for discussion, but mostly I’m a redditor. On average, the comments aren’t as good as slashdot, but I like the ability to customize content. Once I unsubscribed from all the default reddits, and found a few I really like, reddit has been much better.
But most of my news comes from RSS feeds. For tech stuff, I’m subscribed to Schneier and here. But most of my RSS feeds are legal feeds, economics blogs, general news feeds, webcomics, and notification feeds – for stuff like comment replies.
I ditched Digg when I came to uni because it was clogging up my feed reader with a million and one unread items. Still got Slashdot in there though; their output rate isn’t quite so fearsome… BBC news keeps my unread item count high enough as it is (though, much as with Digg, I just skim through the headlines and read a lowish proportion of the actual articles)
Ars Technica
Hacker News (news.ycombinator.com)
Or in the plethora of feeds in my Google Reader though I dumped most of the “tech” feeds, figuring anything of significance will bubble up into blogs like this…
Reddit – haven’t even viewed a page there in years, thought most of the “signal” move over to Hacker News
Digg – I guess this site is still frequented, but don’t understand the appeal…
The ones I mainly use are the online version of APC Magazine and a new one that’s come up that’s good, Delimiter. I read these because there’s an Australian focus on them and they’re well written. I’ve not used the ones you’ve mentioned… should check them out.
Ars Technica
The Register
Lifehacker
Slashdot
ReadWriteWeb
But the reality is I don’t really visit websites, but have all the feed in Google Reader.
I’ve never figured out the appeal of reddit and digg myself.
I don’t actually follow the news myself. I count on my tweeps and facebook friends to catch anything interesting and comment on it. Then I can decide whether to go looking for specifics of the story or just to check wikipedia later.
I use your blog. Tweakers.net, Lifehacker and ReadWriteWeb. But I only read them sporadically.
Slashdot
Lifehacker
gizmodo
endgaget
Techmeme
increasingly I find it important that websites I frequent have a good mobile-interface, as I do more and more of my idle web-surfing on my iPhone…