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Comment by ofalkaed | Hacker News Reader

Oddly enough I had been considering making a similar thread but asking for something akin to HN but with less non-tech news. Perhaps the question that both I and OP are asking is, does anyone know of a site that stays on topic?

>Thoughts? If this doesn’t exist, would people be interested in it being created, and does anyone think it has a chance of taking off

There is absolutely a market for it but it will eventually become a tech forum.

Edit: I apologize for the meta posting, Saturday night, what can I say.

Edit: Prepended "Edit:" to my apology even though it wasn't an edit, it seems more appropriate as an edit. Once again, I apologize for the meta posting, Saturday night, what can I say.

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Of the top 10 HN posts atm, 8 are closely related to software, one is about tech but not computers (Coventry Very Light Rail), and just one is really non-tech (My experiment living in a tent in Hong Kong's jungle).

Is that too much non-tech? Or are the tech posts not news-like enough? Or do you dislike side-tracks in the discussions?

I have already asked for that post to be downvoted into oblivion, see my reply to myself. I despise most side-tracks in internet discussion, they have a tendency to become the main track and uninteresting. I don't expect or want HN to be purely tech but I would love it if people would not use upvoting as a like/agreement and use it to make sure anyone who opens a thread does not have to wade through irrelevant nonsense, pedantry, virtue signalling, etc before getting to the discussion of the thread's topic.

People complain about the lack of humor here but it served a purpose.

People have made many such curations of HN over the years. I can't recall any names of them or if they still exist but just commenting to say it has been done. Honestly, you could probably just have some AI based chrome extension do the filtering for you.

To those that upvoted me, I appreciate the sentiment but I should have been downvoted into oblivion. Upvotes are not likes, they are curation and moderation; upvote comments which produce good discussion even if that comment is terrible and low effort and downvote those comments you love or agree with but will never produce any worthwhile discussion. Sometimes it it hurts to do but it must be done if we want to maintain quality.

With that said, I have had fun tonight, thanks for humoring me but my previous post really should not be top post. If you feel bad about downvoting it or unupvoting it for what ever reason than just upvote this one and downvote my previous, no harm, nor foul, but lets not have my previous post be top post in the thread and lets make sure top post in every thread is good solid, on topic discussion.

I think lobste.rs stays on topic (computers and programming).

Every time I go there the only threads which have any discussion tend to be AI/LLM threads, so technically on topic but I think my previous post should make it clear I am a humanities sort and as a humanities sort I have certain expectations of the STEM community and expect them to stay on their side of the fence. This seems completely reasonable and fair.

They banned the Brave user agent I use, for a transgression from many years ago and hasn't reoccurred, and has nothing to do with the way I use that browser. That's their choice of course, but not one I respect - different if it was an ongoing issue. Why don't they ban Chrome or Firefox for their various and more recent privacy violating problems?

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