[TruthAndDare]

I recently returned to HN, having read it a little a few years back. I remembered it as a low-volume, high-quality feed, where I was hesitant to speak, because all the other comments were so full of knowledge.

Now, HN seems to have become like any other place, full of noise like politics, social commentary, and just regular news. I guess the commenters are still knowledgeable about technological subjects, though.

[Etheryte]

The inevitability of every good site is that it will eventually grow, and with it, the diversity of the interests of the user-base. While I come to HN mainly for the technical news, I find it convenient that it also keeps me in the loop about a wider variety of topics I would surely miss otherwise. Your preference may obviously vary.

[bazzargh]

I browse here with a greasemonkey script to hide links from mainstream news sites, aggregators, etc. That cuts down to mostly just the tech content.

    var links = document.links;
    var boring = [
      'adage.com',
      'arstechnica',
      'bbc',
      'discovermagazine',
      'bloomberg',
      'bloombergview',
      'buzzfeed',
      'businessinsider',
      'californiasunday',
      'cnn',
      'csmonitor',
      'dailymail',
      'digg',
      'economist',
      'engadget',
      'esquire',
      'fastcompany',
      'forbes',
      'ft.com',
      'fortune',
      'fusion',
      'geekwire',
      'gizmodo',
      'harvard.edu',
      'huffingtonpost',
      'inc.com',
      'longreads',
      'medium',
      'mondaynote',
      'nature',
      'nautil.us',
      'newscientist',
      'newstatesman',
      'newyorker',
      'npr.org',
      'nybooks',
      'nymag',
      'nytimes',
      'pando',
      'psychologytoday',
      'qz.com',
      'reddit',
      'reuters',
      'sciencedaily',
      'scientificamerican',
      'slate',
      'techcrunch',
      'telegraph',
      'theatlantic',
      'theguardian',
      'thenation',
      'theparisreview',
      'theverge',
      'theregister',
      'time',
      'usatoday',
      'vancouversun',
      'vice',
      'vimeo',
      'vogue',
      'washingtonpost',
      'wired',
      'wsj',
      'yahoo',
      'youtube',
      'zdnet'
    ];
    matcher = new RegExp('\\b(' + (boring.join('|').replace(/\./g, '\\.')) + ')\\b');
    for (i = 0; i < links.length; i++) {
      hostname = links[i].hostname.replace(/^www\./, '');
      if (hostname.match(matcher)) {
        links[i].style.setProperty('display', 'none');
        links[i].parentNode.insertBefore(document.createTextNode('[removed]'), links[i]);
      }
    }

It's not that I wouldn't read those sites, they're just not what I'm interested in reading when I come here.

[TruthAndDare]

Cool! I've been wondering if there is a feed of only the good stuff. If HN itself doesn't provide one, maybe there should be a separate site that does that filtering. I was thinking it would be manually curated, but maybe a list like yours would work as well.

Maybe you should set up such a site. All it would have to do is link to the articles and to the corresponding HN discussions.

[ximeng]

Most but not all politics and social commentary gets flagged pretty quickly. Some tech news also gets flagged. It would actually be interesting to have a page for flagged stories for transparency.

Getting responses from people actually involved in making tech decisions (like Gratilup here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12113571, and recently one of the original authors of Excel CSV export) is part of the appeal of this site to me.

[lorenzhs]

you can enable showdead in the settings, flagged articles will show up as [dead] in /newest.

[72deluxe]

Out of interest, where would you go for news that was like the old HN?

I used to really enjoy ArsTechnica but the quality of the journalism seems to have dropped slightly.

[iand]

Perhaps https://lobste.rs/ might be an addition to your reading habits?