Every day, I'm rotating between a german blog (Fefe), HN and reddit. I can't stand twitter or instagram, but feel like I'm missing out on interesting content - other blogs, people worth following, maybe news outside of tech.
HN and Reddit here, too. I hit IGN every once in a while (I like their video game reviews). On Reddit, I primarily follow https://old.reddit.com/r/linux, /r/clojure, /r/golang, /r/programming, and /r/technology
Many folks in this thread are recommending which specific subreddits and blogs they like, but I thought I'd comment on the "how" of my web routine that I found useful.
I use feedly.com to follow HN, blogs, subreddits, and news outlets. I split up "Backlogging" and "Reading" as separate activities, which I think promotes focus when reading.
To "backlog", I browse through my feedly feed of HN/Reddit/blogpost titles, marking the ones that sound interesting to "Read Later".
Then later I read through those "read later' posts, saving the best ones in lists and highlights/notes for the future.
The Economist, the NYT, Foreign Affairs, a French newspaper, and sometimes The Verge for consumer tech news. Only long articles, not instant news, the latter are usually just noise.
HN and stack exchange are the only forums I read frequently. Reddit has much lower average quality.
I don't really care that the Russian forces have advanced 5 meters compared to yesterday. I've read too many "articles" that said "this guy said X, this other guy said Y, <5 paragraphs of useless context that I've also read in the last 5 articles>". It won't help you understand a topic, unless you're already well-versed in it.
Long-forms like the Economist's take a few steps back from the day-to-day news and try to give you an overview of a topic. That's what I'm interested in. You have to make the difference between the author's opinion and the facts because most of the Economist's pieces are actually op-eds, but that's better than reading re-hashed PR releases all day long.
I find it more rewarding and less emotionally manipulative in that it doesn't get the same initial rise out of me when I read a headline or see an image.
The way news sites / digg / reddit / twitter / you name it seem to be designed is many headlines compete for attention and each is trying to catch your eye and deliver a take home message in the title. I truly think the intent is to deliver a message and hope the reader doesn't dive in to learn about it. That feeds a gratification loop, even before you throw propaganda and shilling in.
Certainly this forum isn't immune either and I notice it in topics relevant to my field but outside tech (which is not my area). "Lowering sodium intake doesn’t help heart patients" from the other day comes to mind with its biting take on a question that is clinically irrelevant for most people unless they are considering tighter sodium control but hey, the title leaves a nice impression if you skim and feeds into some crazy opinions if you already have them.
I've resubscribed to some paper magazines to be able to enjoy them over a cup of coffee to over come this and use a service to send large articles to my kindle. I keep meaning to find a way to integrate it with wallabag.
I still read Le Monde because they touch on a lot of topics and are usually honest. But their bias is tiring sometimes, like with the current election. I vote for their candidate, but I'm not impressed with the barrage of one-sided reporting. It's still kind of the French "paper of record" though.
Maybe try Le Monde Diplomatique. They're more critical towards globalization and free exchange, but even if you don't agree with them, their articles always dig deep and leave you knowing the subject. They even have English translations for some articles. Recommended by a history teacher some years ago and I haven't been disappointed.
Ars Technica. Not perfect, but one of the best tech news sites in my view (especially their space coverage and their occasional deep dives on a science topic). And its comment section is, mostly, worth checking out. Like anywhere it can get a little echo-chamber-y at times, but it mostly stays pretty civil. It's helped by the story authors and editors hanging out in the comments.
I find Reddit to be really high noise, no matter how selective I get with subs, so sadly I don’t really check it often.
I do also regularly hit up CNBC because I think they do a great job of covering world news and big moves in tech and I check my GitHub recommendations on a fairly regular basis.
I would love more “small HN” stuff - neat projects, old articles/blog posts, and generally just normal people.
Every morning I visit three websites before starting work.
1. HN
2. TechCrunch
3. Gizmodo (They randomly have extremely high-quality journalistic articles)
In addition to those, I often read from the articles listed on my browser extension https://daily.dev/. They have cool developer-first articles
Reddit browsing I’ve controlled; anyway I subscribe to very niche subs which don’t encourage comment hordes and meaningless quips etc.
My Twitter feed is a pleasant echo chamber tuned to my literary and cinematic taste (almost zero anything else) and it takes at most total 30-40m a week of my time, or less. I don’t even check it daily.
Then there’s 2-3 mailing lists I’m member of where I read/reply 20-30 mins everyday.
iOS Screen Time feature helps but it doesn’t give a nuclear option - “just block - no extension!”.
Surprisingly HN takes quite some of my time and that too for just “checking” it; and if I am being really honest HN also is the most useless and least significant (in any way) of these all such sites. When I look at it holistically over quite some time it’s really monotonous, insipid, and uninspiring. It’s really a regurgitating mass of comments. So no it’s not the quality for sure.
I sometimes succeed in getting off HN for weeks/months and then it again sticks like a leech that I notice when it’s heavy again after having sucked enough.
My browser start page is legiblenews which pulls from there. I usually check cbc.ca, bbc.com or aljazeera if I want something less biased (IMHO), and then this site for the first page or two. Once a week maybe some interest / local city related subreddits e.g. fossdroid, longreads, personalfinancecanada, selfhosted.
Professionally for my field I try to read through rheumnow.com at at least skim it as a curated aggregator. I add interesting topics for later to wallabag with wallabagger and sometimes send them to my kindle.
I refuse to use twitter, instagram similar to the poster but I would also add that I refuse to go to youtube for most content or news that could be in written form.
The last few months have been interesting enough so I don't really browse much these days. When I do it's usually skimming HN for interesting topics/discussions and sporza.be for cycling news.
Now that I think of it it has not really been a conscious choice to browse so little. It just happened over the span of a few months. I used to spend hours on reddit/twitch and local news sites, bingewatch tv shows but it looks like I don't care anymore about all that stuff and I like it much better this way. I'm either sitting at my desktop working for work/sideprojects, or I'm away from all screens playing guitar, being outside etc.
I have a bunch of stuff, HN included, in my RSS feed that I peruse most mornings. A mix of real news, tech news, gaming news, whatever HN is, and a little bit of business/startup news as well.
I'm partial to the occasional doom-scroll on Twitter as well, especially if something important is occurring in real time (Ukraine invasion comes to mind for this).
Techcrunch has a weird tracking mechanism where you visit an intermediate site before you end up on the main site again and that gets blocked here by default, so I stopped going there. It wasn't that interesting to begin with so no real loss.
the discords I follow are usually niche topics and I found them through 'the community around that niche topics'... they more or less replaced the old topical phpBB forums.
Reddit, HN, lobste.rs, tildes.net are the aggregators I regularly visit.
I follow a handful of interesting people via Twitter.
All the rest I consume via RSS — I follow about 380 feeds at the moment. I use Miniflux.app as backend (hosted plan), Reeder on my phone and NetNewsWire on my Mac.
Pinkbike, core77, newatlas. I also subscribe to email newsletters ruby weekly, Postgres weekly, frontend focus and tldr. Important stuff seems to find me. There are some awesome podcasts out there too. Check out ‘13 minutes to the moon’
I don't remember how I stumbled across Aeon, but it's been one of my favourite finds in a long time! The quality and range of articles is extremely good. IMO it's almost on par with HN for finding well written pieces.
Every morning I visit HN, rdrama.net, and the subreddits canada, personalfinancecanada, and my city subreddit. Also Twitch and YouTube, but I’m not sure if they count
Here, Reddit, and Twitter pretty much. I enjoy the content on some sites (Bloomberg, Financial Times, WSJ) but they want me to pay and I haven't convinced myself to do so, yet.
Infuriatingly, there aren't a lot of options for other topics.