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Ask YC: If you could create the ultimate tech news site what would it look like?

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11–16 of 16 posts

Re: Ask YC: If you could create the ultimate tech news site what would it look like?

#11
I'd like to see a quality over quantity site.

Today, technology news has a problem: people who might know what they're talking about don't write. Blogs are somewhat better but the blogger doesn't have an incentive to collect opposing points of view or do boring fact-checking or tedious testing.

I see a lot of people saying that the comments are the best part of the article. This is wrong. You only feel this way because tech reporting is so degraded.

What I would like: a news site that figures out some way to make money off rare information and insightful reporting. One half Consumer Reports, one half the Marc Andressen blog. Even if this resulted in there being just a few posts per day, I think I would read it. Plus, on the web, quality information can rake in pageviews over a long period of time, so this strategy isn't economic suicide. It does take a longer time to pay off.

Maybe there are a few sites like this today, such as Tom's Hardware or Ars Technica, but I am not much of a hardware guy. I deal with web software, and the writing around that topic seems to be decidedly fluffy.

Re: Ask YC: If you could create the ultimate tech news site what would it look like?

#12
News can be too much like popcorn: unsatisfying one by one, bad for you en mass, and usually consumed while procrastinating.

If the articles instead brought difficult epiphanies, and challenging tasks, one might find it in them to attend to one's work first, and tackle some of the 'new articles' (say, a new fascicle from Knuth) later.

Re: Ask YC: If you could create the ultimate tech news site what would it look like?

#13
I see you are having big aspirations. ;-) Regarding the style of writing, I personally like two styles: one is a temperate, sensible, normal writing (something like Robert Scoble or kottke), another style I like is the Gizmodo/Engadget type.

Re: Ask YC: If you could create the ultimate tech news site what would it look like?

#15
Apple has taught us that good taste is everything. I'd like to see a build-your-own news site that allows individuals or small groups to maintain their own mini-reddit in a more moderatorship-style. Make the front page showcase the most popular feeds and feed-artists.

Re: Ask YC: If you could create the ultimate tech news site what would it look like?

#16
Here's something that nobody talks about: people writing articles from different points of view.

We don't get this often. We dont' have one person talking about a product's design and another person about its performance and a third person about the sort of community it's developed. We get one or another, and it's never organized.

I love reading about design, less so about pure opinion on subjects. Having multiple takes on tech would be a very cool feature that I've never seen on a site before.

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