Reading the thread on whether or not HN should be a "general news" site I can't help but wonder if that opinion is affected by whether or not HN is your primary news source.
Poll: Is HN your main online news source?
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Re: Poll: Is HN your main online news source?
#2[deleted]
Re: Poll: Is HN your main online news source?
#3Nope, it's one of many, although it is one of the most sticky ones.
Re: Poll: Is HN your main online news source?
#4HN gives me the news that I care about. Lots of tech, some science, and only a tiny, tiny bit of world events. This mix means that only really good science articles make it through, and only really really good worldnews articles make it through.
I usually wake up every morning and check HN to make sure that the world isn't ending. If North Korea launches a nuke at South Korea, despite it not being technology news, I'd bet that it makes it to the top of HN within a few minutes.
Recently I also started using an RSS reader that I wrote a while ago (I wrote it, then pretty much forgot about it): http://newsyndicated.com/a/reader it aggregates my favorite feeds (including HN, which is how i found this thread to begin with), and also allows me to submit directly to HN.
Re: Poll: Is HN your main online news source?
#5I do subscribe to other RSS feeds, but looking at netnewswire's "Attention" feed report, I do visit HN linked sites more than any other.
I think this is a function of how practically useful the information is to me personally.
Conventional news tells me about a lot of things I can't do anything about - I'm pretty much a passive observer. I mean, in terms of politics I get to vote once every year or two? And anything macroeconomic is far outside my control, but might inform me slightly of where people may spend money in the next year or two.
Contrast that with tech news and what gets posted on HN - it's stuff I can either pick up and use (new languages/concepts/scripts/etc.) or that people will actually go to me for advice on. I can take an active roll and have give and take - there are opportunities for interaction there that are manageable.
Re: Poll: Is HN your main online news source?
#6I answered yes but I probably read about the same number of articles linked on Twitter but I don't "go to Twitter" for news. I've stopped using a RSS reader, Twitter does a better job of curating the content I want.
Re: Poll: Is HN your main online news source?
#71.HN
2./r/worldnews
3./r/politics
4...More Reddit.
5.Twitter
Re: Poll: Is HN your main online news source?
#8HN is my main source for "my kind" of news. Google News is my main source for mainstream news. (BBC gets in there sometimes for more of a world/different from U.S. perspective)
Re: Poll: Is HN your main online news source?
#9I keep telling myself that I need to explore "real" news sites like the BBC or Guardian (or...), but never quite get there.
I primarily stick to Slashdot and HN but know full well that the views in the comments of the two sites can sometimes be very detached/different from the rest of society.
While this isn't necessarily a bad thing, it is something to be careful of and I'd hate to find the day all of my own opinions fit a site perfectly.
Re: Poll: Is HN your main online news source?
#10I answered "Yes," but only in a convoluted reading of the question.
Most accurately, HN is the only online service I use that is mainly a source of news.
Put another way, I come here for the information and discussion, and it just happens to be a news site[1]. Before HN, I went nowhere (online or offline) explicitly to obtain news. After HN, I expect I will, again, simply do without.
[1] Which suits it well, IMO. I always flag old/repeat articles.