I'm a politics junkie/anorak for Australia/UK as well as multiple other countries and polities.
I have been completely dissatisfied with the precipitous decline, as well as pay-walling, of broadsheets over the last decade and a half that I've been a regular reader. They simply can't do serious coverage because adverts demand they do lowest common denominator reporting. Also I want more than one side to a story and basically all papers, whether they like to declare it or not, have a position and so I end up at least going to two broadsheets to settle my mind on an issue.
Reddit was good for a while but the memes, insults, manipulation of multiple subreddits by racist groups (/r/worldnews, /r/europe) and the bashing down of anything that isn't left-wing on others (again, I want to see all points of view) got me very tired of it.
Twitter is good, but there is so much you can miss, links aren't headlines and I have absolutely zero interest in the meme-like jocularity and 'what I had for lunch' postings. Although discovery is fairly good it's entirely subject to the filter bubble effect and people are often ranting to a select group of yes-women and yes-men.
I want clustered news and opinion, and I want it ranked globally not against my own personal filter bubble. As there is nothing out there that fits my reading pattern I have started building http://jkl.io . However crowdfunding hasn't worked to get it going beyond a prototype and so it's going to be longer development cycle to add further features like machine learning (plus votes) ranked comments. But hopefully all that will be done by the end of the year as well as different views and ways of getting into the data. That said, it's now at a stage where it's genuinely my first stop before all the others, and once there are more sources, comments and the like, it will be the perfect overview - for me personally, perhaps not for others - of news/politics/policy/economics/science/tech across the world.
Also: criticism here would be most welcome, my other thread asking for feedback from HN never caught on.
I don't have a daily reading list, as I've found that it harms my productivity. I usually let the problem I'm trying to solve drive me to reading and research. Other than having something to talk about at the water cooler, I've found that trying to "stay informed" or "keep abreast of industry trends" are just excuses for not doing real work.
If you must know, I was glancing over the headlines while eating breakfast, pondering how to get a colleague to stop being so theoretical and actually try putting some of their ideas into action. (A very smart person who, as you may have guessed, reads tons of stuff everyday.)
To mutilate an old saying: In theory, reading about something and doing something are the same thing. In practice, they're not.
(edit: P.S. There was a time when I read everything I could get my hands on. I eventually learned that I much prefer to be effective, not smart.)
Reddit should compensate voting based on subreddit activity. I only have a few subreddits on my homepage, and for example the Bitcoin one gets entirely overruled by TIL.
Reddit, for sure. If you haven't tried it for a while, give it another go. There are some excellent sub-Reddits and just turning off some of the worst default ones can make a big difference to the quality.
I joined reddit about 4-5 years ago and soon got sick of the same old posts, memes, jokes and comments over and over. Switching off the default subreddits and joining some smaller ones relevant to my interest turned it into an entirely different experience. It's only a shame that in light of recent events (r/findthebostonbombers, r/creepshots, etc) people see the site as a single-minded community rather than a diverse collection of very different ones.
EDIT: some of my subs include gamedev, getdisciplined, depthhub, truereddit, dailyprogrammer, entrepeneur
I recently decided that I could probably really enjoy Reddit again if I did some Spring cleaning.
First, I went to http://www.reddit.com/subreddits/mine and clicked the link in the sidebar title "multireddit of your subscriptions". I backed this up, mostly because maybe I have a problem with letting things go.
Then you can either manually click all of the "Unsubscribe" buttons, or use some javascript to do it for you (make sure you use a setTimeout(), otherwise once you refresh you'll realize that it only clicked one of them).
Lastly, I subbed to a small handful, making my frontpage a lot more interesting, and definitely more focused on my current interests:
edit: already I want to add more, having read Peter Cooper's comment with some, reminding me about ones I have forgotten! I'll spare making this list larger though, as I'd probably just keep filling it and filling it.
I love that Reddit. I use it to practice my websearch skills. When I have some knowledge about something I know what words to use, so going to that subreddit gives me a bunch of stuff where I have no knowledge at all, and I need to learn the right words to use.
There's almost a sub-Reddit for everything so making recommendations is a bit like recommending your favorite bands, but some I particularly enjoy are..
Reddit have said they're opposed to the concept of 'killfiles', which improve the experience for the person using them but not for the group as a whole. Reddit prefers you to downvote comments that shouldn't be there.
That can be good when you get the right subreddit.
And we used to have DejaVu (then Google) keeping all of Usenet, and it's now available. There have been some important (for computing) announcements made on Usenet and it would have been a shame to have lost those. I can imagine Reddit could get to the point where people make announcements there; and it's gently worrying that no-one is archiving this kind of stuff.
I get as much value from the comments as the stories themselves so:
- HN (still the king for quality of comments as well as generally interesting links)
- Reddit (some sub-reddits are very interesting, especially domain specific ones)
- Stackoverflow sites (some great info here, but their rather draconian rules on questions that require opinions can cause frustrations as many answers do require some sort of opinion. It is quite amazing how often I get value from questions that have been closed as not constructive.)
- BoingBoing.net (used to be a regular but has become too weird for my tastes)
I don't really visit websites as such. I use Google Reader as my jumping off point for 75% of what I read online. I hope that once Reader goes dark that I'll find something that fills the void well enough for the transition not to be too harsh.
The rest of my reading is done here and in the accompanying comment threads, of course, and also NeoGAF, a video game forum that (I only realized this week) I've been frequenting for well over a decade.
Is the extension at least stable? I seem to have terrible luck with extensions and also seem to run into memory leaks or other issues so I tend to avoid them lately.
A few people have mentioned Reddits, and some of them really are great. For those who use RSS, you can subscribe to your front page. https://ssl.reddit.com/prefs/feeds/
Similarly, if you want a feed of some specific subreddits, you can use something like reddit.com/r/programming+entrepeneur/.rss
Rather than having a daily list, I use Feeder (Chrome extension: http://feeder.co/)
to read my RSS feeds, I had always preferred it to Google Reader, I never did get myself into the mantra of checking Reader often (it ended up being once every few months, when I randomly remembered)
; however Feeder is nice in its minimalistic approach, just showing me how many items for each feed, which encourages me to zero it out, although unlike Reader it just shows the titles of RSS feed items, so I end up judging whether or not to read an article based on the title.
"Rather than having a daily list" I check this very regularly, based on the amount of feed items displayed on the icon. And it's hard to tell, but I do end up reading quite a wide variety of articles some days, other days, I just open the interesting ones, but it's just a sensory overload so on those days, I just end up just opening tabs and leaving them there to read in the future.
Randy Pausch said in his time management lecture (a good companion to "The Last Lecture") that your criterion for office reading material should be "Will I lose my job if I don't read this?" http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/Randy/
I don't think that's good advice and leads to some very short term thinking.
Reading only the stuff that you must in order to not get fired is tantamount to doing to bare minimum. Having a sciolistic knowledge about many topics is helpful when coming up with new ideas (and more importantly, knowing where to look when you need to do a deep dive), as well as making you a well-rounded person.
Well since the question asked for one website, I'd say Google News. It gets me quickly caught up with what's what in the world.
OTOH, for a longer read with topics I'm interested in, I hit Zite on my iPad or on my Android phone. I've got Zite configured with my favorite subjects, and now I'm fairly comfortable that I'm hitting 80-90% of the most interesting articles/goings-on without having to hit dozens of feeds or sites.
I read Slashdot for many years however Hacker News has replaced it for me now. The quality of discussion has become very poor over there plus the stories are often a few days old before they hit the frontpage.
I think the summaries are the thing that make me stay on /., especially as HN has strict no-editorializing title policy. I've many times missed an interesting story on HN, then read it from /. and came back to HN for comments.
I have been completely dissatisfied with the precipitous decline, as well as pay-walling, of broadsheets over the last decade and a half that I've been a regular reader. They simply can't do serious coverage because adverts demand they do lowest common denominator reporting. Also I want more than one side to a story and basically all papers, whether they like to declare it or not, have a position and so I end up at least going to two broadsheets to settle my mind on an issue.
Reddit was good for a while but the memes, insults, manipulation of multiple subreddits by racist groups (/r/worldnews, /r/europe) and the bashing down of anything that isn't left-wing on others (again, I want to see all points of view) got me very tired of it.
Twitter is good, but there is so much you can miss, links aren't headlines and I have absolutely zero interest in the meme-like jocularity and 'what I had for lunch' postings. Although discovery is fairly good it's entirely subject to the filter bubble effect and people are often ranting to a select group of yes-women and yes-men.
I want clustered news and opinion, and I want it ranked globally not against my own personal filter bubble. As there is nothing out there that fits my reading pattern I have started building http://jkl.io . However crowdfunding hasn't worked to get it going beyond a prototype and so it's going to be longer development cycle to add further features like machine learning (plus votes) ranked comments. But hopefully all that will be done by the end of the year as well as different views and ways of getting into the data. That said, it's now at a stage where it's genuinely my first stop before all the others, and once there are more sources, comments and the like, it will be the perfect overview - for me personally, perhaps not for others - of news/politics/policy/economics/science/tech across the world.
Also: criticism here would be most welcome, my other thread asking for feedback from HN never caught on.