Hacker News vs Reddit and Digg

It's moved me a bit off of reddit, though I have to say there's a lot of content that gets cross posted (usually from reddit --> HN).

HN really is the hidden gem of news sites and communities. I love it!

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* Great stuff on the homepage....ALWAYS something I'm interested in!

* The comment system isn't full of witty comments just said to get karma....Reddit is big for this, and even Digg, even though it doesn't have an overall user karma system!

* Overall, HN makes NEW knowledge, it doesn't just pass on current knowledge - people asking questions, and getting answers, both in submissions and comments, is a massive sign of the quality of the users.

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Long live the current state of HN!

absolutely, I just hope that HN will not get advertised too much, because then we will be flooded by the digg-like submissions

Just to reply to my own post, the site was called Infosec Update - http://news.mandalorian.com if anyone is interested.

This sort of post is one of the great failures in social news sites. 7 upvotes, 13th on the front page, zero interesting content. The cause is the plague of feel-good "me too"-ism, groupthink and lowest-common-denominator-ism that causes people to upvote things uncritically and eventually leads to the mass-upvoting of poor articles and comments (especially the immortal "[pic]", agreeable question/'vote up if' or 'hilarious' YouTube video) over good more thought-provoking, challenging and nuanced ones. I think it's a big flaw in the concept of social news sites ala Hacker News, Reddit and Digg.

Relevant to the topic, I've been moving towards MetaFilter lately as it doesn't suffer from this problem as much due to the design of the site, has the bonus of hand-moderation and the $5 entrance fee is a surprisingly good way of limiting membership. The flip side of this is that the content is a very mixed bag in terms of submission quality and topic due to the hugely different styles and interests of submitters - even more so than other social news sites. The comments there are often unparalleled in terms of quality, however, and Ask MeFi is an invaluable resource.

I poked around with Planets (blog aggregators on one topic) for a while but the amount of content is generally overbearing to make it impractical to read them for any great length of time.

I'm slowly but surely warming to the idea that old-style blogs that link to the other content may be a good idea but the question is finding a good ones that are regularly updated, whose moderation you can trust and whose interests align with yours. I do read Boing Boing, Ajaxian and Engadget who follow this format, but I think Slashdot has suffered from it over time by deviating from its core subject matter, has become a caricature of itself especially with regards to its biases and suffered from dumbing down over time. Of course, it's still an open problem as to where they get their content from and how they filter the good from the bad.

Perhaps the conclusion is that the whole concept of a link-driven news site is still largely an open problem - and I'm certainly not sure what the solution is.