I used to be on both reddit and hacker news, since they started about the same time. They replaced my slashdot, k5 and digg habits, and became a source of news and information for me.
HN/Hacker News
HN is such a narrowly focused site, and the people who inhabit it are so libertarian-brained these days (was it always this way?) that it is hard to read comments anymore.
People are so self-styled as intelligent and above everyone else there that it is terminally brain damaging anymore.
Reddit is both great and horrible, and it is still sort of useful, but the UI is slowly turning to garbage (new reddit). I will stick with old reddit and RES, and when that dies, I will probably leave reddit…
It has had various problems in the past (jailbait sub, fph, etc). This has kind of led the admins to be overly aggressive in policing other subs.
substitutes and replacements
- lemmy
- lobste.rs
- tildes
Tildes
I’ve been using Tildes for over a year now(since mid 2023), even though I registered an account back in May 2018. I started using the account again in July 2023, because there was a tildes semi-official Minecraft server (defunct since the end of March 2024), though a new one has popped up.
Lobste.rs
I was able to wrangle an invite for Lobste.rs a while back and have participated semi-regularly for a while.
old sites come and gone
- slashdot and clones
- I mean, Slashdot is still around, but it doesn’t really carry the weight it once did. Not since around 2008-2009 by my recollection.
- plastic.com
- Kuro5hin - users stopped posting, though there were people claiming it was dead since 2003. Officially, the site stopped existing in 2015 when Rusty pulled the plug on it.
- Digg - died after a rebrand (multiple times!), and most people fled to reddit. There was also a scandal involving a pay for likes scheme. I almost miss this place, except for the fact that the management there was horrible.
- Digg is starting back up, but it seems to be an app-first experience, unfortunately.