The Many Ways To Read Tech News
March 29, 2024 2 minute read
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.
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:
