What sites do you people use for new online? Me, I'm having some real trouble finding a good site for nerd news. And I will now proceed to write a longwinded rant on the subject!
I've read Slashdot for a long time, but let's be honest, it's junk. Summaries are ridiculously biased or outright wrong a lot of the time, the discussion is full of zealots, and so on. Still, Slashdot has a number of advantages over a lot of other sites, namely: It actually has summaries, and they are even well written sometimes, giving you a good overview of the article and a good hint if you want to bother reading or not. It also has a good volume of news, and a comparatively good signal/noise ratio, even though it is still pretty bad.
I really don't like "social news" sites. They end up being popularity contests, and the lack of editorial control means you have to keep seeing really badly written items. Digg is horrible because of this. And Reddit has no summaries at all, making reading it an exercise in either reading far too much, or trying to reverse-engineer the contents of an article from just a headline.
Ars Technica was a place I used to like a lot, but after they redesigned it, they went to a format with short, content-less summaries that made it too much of a bother to read, becuase you ended up reading everything anyway because the summaries were no help. I was recently thinking of starting reading it again anyway for lack of anything better, but then they switched their design again to something incredibly soulless and slick - slick in the sense of a insurance salesman out to trick you out of all your money. It makes me sad just looking at it.
RSS feeds are a nice idea in theory, but in practice, they fall flat for much the same reason as a lot of the others: Summaries. RSS summaries are often just the first paragraph of the article, or even worse, the first N sentences or M words. For a well-written journalistic article, this is a valid way to summarize, because the article is written to make this possible, but exceedingly few articles on the web are well-written in any way, and so RSS summaries are also useless.
But is there some kind of news paradise I have missed out on? Or at least some trick to get some slightly higher-quality news for one's morning reading?
i mostly just read the register...
and akregator can be set to load the whole article instead of just the summary...
The Register? Slashdot looks like a bastion of unbiased and honest journalism compared to them.
WTF, The Register? You realize that's written by stuck-up 40-year-old Linux nerds.
I get my news from Slashdot and http://programming.reddit.com/ .
I get my news from http://4-ch.net/news/. It is simply without peer.
what's news?