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…

I use your blog. Tweakers.net, Lifehacker and ReadWriteWeb. But I only read them sporadically.

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.

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.

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
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…

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)

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 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.

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.