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)?
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.
I have been extremely happy to find
Especially when it surfaces a topic with three articles from across the bias spectrum, it feels very rewarding being able to get a fuller picture.
How would you handle news where there is sufficient evidence to show one set of reporting is accurate and relatively unbiased, but another report is all made up and designed to inflame its audience?
Admittedly it takes more time to do this, and I can see not being able to invest that in a general sense. I personally think it's worth it.
On the other hand, the subjects that are politically contentious are not rigorous and leave plenty of room for reasonable debate.
If anything, science reporting tends to err the other way, uncritically reporting sensational results that contradict one other, have not been confirmed, or fail to replicate.
I rarely see a popular science article that doesn't report the results of a single experiment as if they were instantly established fact.
However, there's also the other side of things, which is mostly established science. Which, you're right, don't typically spark political debate... but they do sometimes. Vaccines, climate change, cholesterol, seed oils. The RFK Jr faction of anti-science is rife these days.
But I just looked for those topics in the official Make America Healthy Again report [1].
The positions in that report on those topics were not so unreasonable. It says seed oils are a concern because they are ultra-processed fats, only mentions cholesterol in the context of PFAS, and says "vaccines benefit children by protecting them from infectious diseases" but we may not need to give children nearly 30 doses of them.[2]
I do think his general position that processed food is unhealthy is not only reasonable, it generally matches conventional modern medical thinking, even if he is wrong about a few details.
And of course people looking for political ammunition only look for details they can use against him.
1: https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/MAHA-R...
2: https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/hcp/imz-schedules/index.html
https://www.notus.org/health-science/make-america-healthy-ag...
Does anyone know anything similar covering international news?
I want to be aware of what's happening, but not to drown in it. How to achieve that is not only a good question but the right question.
>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.
Is that too much non-tech? Or are the tech posts not news-like enough? Or do you dislike side-tracks in the discussions?
People complain about the lack of humor here but it served a purpose.
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.
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.
https://www.phoronix.com/ https://www.neowin.net/ https://kbd.news/ https://betanews.com/
Anime Titties (not a joke) is great for doom scrolling and realizing how fucked everything is.
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.
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.
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.
Ask HN: Sites like HN on other topics?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37611708
Ask HN: What are some communities like HN?
and add it to my RSS feed. this gives me news articles that dont have hyperbolic headlines.
Link in my profile.
Long-standing community blog with an eclectic mix of link-heavy text posts. The Q&A subsite, Ask MetaFilter, is also quite good.
And, considering HN is quite far left, you won't create anything new really.
Ha.
HN is at best center-right.
Update: On further reflection, it is not HN that I am describing. It is the content of the posts that seem to lean that way...
I am outside both of the US parties, I think it is like being sober at a party of those partaking in alcohol. Different perception of the same situation.
Reddit is generally fairly centrist-left for the most part.
Nuanced discussion of things like immigration are challenging though, in all fora I think. I’ve tried to make the point that this is a great opportunity for Europe to pick up valuable American immigrants but somehow am apparently being xenophobic by sharing data of net tax contributions of immigrants by region of origin
Look, you can be as right-wing as you want and get away with it, nobody cares. The problem is a lot of right-wingers just... can't do it. They can't. They have to throw in something racist, or something sexist, or say something disparaging about brown people. It's like some kind of compulsion, I don't know.
You can talk about immigration policy allllll you want. You can. What you can't do is call Puerto Ricans trash. That's off the table.
So, if your example you're looking up to is someone like Trump and his cronies, that basically means yes, you're censored. Not because you're right-wing, but because you're crude and don't know how to express your views in a way that isn't disingenuous. Just be normal, be good faith, don't race bait, and you know... I promise it'll work out. I promise.