Ask HN: HN Alternatives?

This will aggregate all of those subreddits in to a single view.

Bingo! I think this is the solution to the eternal September effect on communities.

You get a super nice place like reddit when it was new and shiny and over time it gets taken over by trolls. So you move on to startup news, then hacker news, but soon that is filled with generic crap and shallow discussions as well.

So you move on to an individually selected group of sub-reddits and then just keep moving, like a nomad always moving away form the trolls. (Or not even necessarily trolls, just too much popularity which brings shallowness if no actual trolling.)

I strongly encourage everyone to try this. Keep in mind the default reddit includes subreddits like pics and WTF which basically equals 4chan, so quickly edit your settings.

Here are some more that might be of interest to the HN crowd:

http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/ (replace haskell with your language of choice, it's bound to exist)

http://www.reddit.com/r/netsec/

http://www.reddit.com/r/ReverseEngineering/

http://www.reddit.com/r/coding/ (a replacement for /r/programming, which has suffered due to its popularity)

http://www.reddit.com/r/solostartups/

I'm going to start posting my "Not quite formal enough for HN" stuff there, since I tend to be self conscious when posting stupid questions related to working on my startup alone to the general HN audience. It's not Hacker News' fault, I'm just to shy to put myself out in front of such a large audience most of the time.

http://www.reddit.com/r/learnit/

I've found the most useful time I spend online is reading good introductions to concepts/subjects I wish I knew more about, and I want to do more of it. Hence the subreddit.

It seems pointless to subscribe to new subreddits since you don't know whether they'll have traction. How can you find 'trending' subreddits?

Or am I thinking about this all wrong?

The submission/banning criteria is actionable startup advice for tech startup founders. Relevant tech is OK as long as it directly relates to or is obviously useful to startups. No news. And no politics, economics, science, etc. unless it meets the startup criteria.

The site is running open source reddit, so there is ample opportunity to hack it as well. I've done a few minor things, and I plan to add email notifications as well. Feel free to fork reddit on github and play around.

It sounds like I should just go ahead and start this entrepreneur forum that I'm envisioning.

And for those of you about to down-vote this comment: where are the articles pointing out the problems with HN, where are the articles showing the flaws in Lisp, where are the articles which denounce venture-capital-funded startups as the snake-oil of the modern age?

"But those positions are wrong!", the puppeteers cry. Really? Last time I checked, questioning conventional wisdom is what made the modern western world possible.

The design of HN is news oriented, not discussion or community oriented. And because it doesn't have categories, when the amount of submission reaches a certain size, up-voting "new" posts has marginal effect compares to random floods of submissions.

A year and half ago, I was reading every "new" post, because I wanted to be fair, but it's just not feasible right now.

If people were more selective with their upvotes the front page wouldn't be filled with <topic of the day> articles.

I have a hard time upvoting articles; Although I may have found an article interesting, I'm not sure if it deserves to be on the front page. I find it easier to say this shouldn't be on the front page (Lately I've found myself saying that about many of the articles that are).

Maybe flagging/downvoting articles should be promoted to keep things off of the front page instead. (don't think you can downvote articles)

Unless you keep raising karma thresholds for moderation and posting to keep the where-is-the-next-Digg crowd out.

Great find, by the way.