The Many Ways To Read Tech News
When I am interested in reading tech news, I have a few sites I often visit, such as:
- https://news.ycombinator.com (aka Hacker News)
- https://lobste.rs
- https://www.reddit.com/r/programming
These sites and many others collect links to other original sources, such as blog posts, news articles, tech projects, etc. Until recently I wasn’t aware of just how many sites aggregate the same links.
I wrote a couple of blog posts recently that managed to get on the front page of Hacker News, Lobste.rs, etc. and saw just how many places linked to my post.
This is by no means scientific, but I tried to capture and group some of the popular aggregators, roughly sorted by how many referrals I received from each one. There are many, many more that seem to be single person hobby projects. Hacker News in particular seems to attract a lot of folks building and hosting alternative frontends.
Maybe you’ll discover a new preferred way to read tech news.
Hacker News Alternative Frontends
Judging by these sites, there are a few reasons why people run alternative frontends to Hacker News. Most of these present the same information but with a different user interface. Some change the content by adjusting the rankings of posts, snapshotting different time periods (e.g. top links per day for each day), or adding summaries. I’ve commented on a few of them in the list:
- https://hckrnews.com
- https://hn.algolia.com (Search, filtering and sorting)
- https://www.daemonology.net/hn-daily (Top posts per day)
- https://hackerweb.app
- https://hn.premii.com
- https://hn.svelte.dev
- https://hackernews.betacat.io (ChatGPT summaries)
- https://www.hackernewz.com
- https://news.social-protocols.org
- https://hnrss.github.io (Custom, realtime RSS feeds)
- https://hnrankings.info (Rank of posts over time)
- https://vue-hn.netlify.app
- https://hn42.net
- https://hn.toonmaterial.com
- http://hnapp.com (Search interface)
- http://hn.elijames.org
- https://yester-hn.riched.net
- https://ycombinator.mytools.pw
- https://yahni.news
- https://www.hntoplinks.com
- https://www.hakaran.com
- https://www.distilhn.com (AI generated summaries)
- https://whnex.com
- https://viralerts.com
- https://slacker-news.fly.dev
- https://news.sune.one
- https://modernorange.io
- https://innerself-hn.com
- https://hn.test.tube (Top posts by time period)
- https://hackernewsday.com (Top posts by day)
Aggregate Multiple Sources
These are the sites which aggregate multiple sources into one interface. Most of these show separate lists for each source, but a few do combine them into unified lists.
- https://hackurls.com
- https://brutalist.report
- https://skimfeed.com
- https://devurls.com
- https://jimmyr.com
- https://progscrape.com (Unified list)
- https://serializer.io (Unified list)
- https://www.freshnews.org
- https://spike.news
- https://techurls.com
- https://upstract.com
- https://nuuz.io
- https://now.hackertab.dev
- https://webdigest.pages.dev
- https://summary.nz
- https://readspike.com
- https://popuris.com
- https://old.thenews.im
- https://news.t0.vc (Unified list)
- https://news.cyberwar.nl
- https://linksfor.dev
Mailing Lists
There are also a handful of popular mailing lists, likely getting their stories from the main aggregators. I doubt I have a full list here, however, since the referrer is generally a email client instead of the website.
- https://tldr.tech
- https://hackernewsletter.com
- https://daily.dev
- https://www.pointer.io
- https://www.bigdatanewsweekly.com
- https://www.hndigest.com
- https://architecturenotes.co
I also learned about https://kill-the-newsletter.com, which converts newsletters into Atom feeds, which can then be consumed via news readers.
Misc
There are other popular tech podcasts, but The Changelog has really good show notes with links so it was easy to see that folks had clicked through.
And of course there are other sets of user submitted posts where I saw some traffic, such as:
- https://slashdot.org
- https://alterslash.org (Alternative Slashdot frontend)
- https://www.sqox.com
- https://lemmy.world
I also came across a bunch of sites in other languages, but I left those out because in most cases, it was hard for me to determine quite what they were doing.