Ask HN: What are some niche or alternative news aggregators worth checking out?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20719651

114 59 7 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

I know this question has been asked before, in one form or the next. But I'd like to make a push to expand my media diet. Are there any domain specific aggregators you use, or are there any promising new plays in the news aggregation space?

boramalper2• 7 years ago

http://lobste.rs

Though it’s not unlike HN so not sure how worthy it is if you are already here.

solarkraft• 7 years ago

I like the articles, but would like to be able to contribute.

Do you happen to be willing to share an invitation?

boramalper2• 7 years ago

I’m not a member either, just lurking.

sterban• 7 years ago

I built https://statesreport.com as an ad-free news aggregator. Let me know what you think!

amerf14• 7 years ago

Hey I'm the cofounder of EnergyAnts. Its a news aggregator for the Energy industry. We launched during this batch's startup school. Looking forward to some feedback!

Check it out https://www.energyants.com

arthurcolle• 7 years ago

why ants?

amerf14• 7 years ago

We dig deep for links to post on the website, we also aim to acquire a lot of user from all over who crawl for info to post. Also Ants it sounds cool!

VygmraMGVl• 7 years ago

Are you only focused on hydrocarbons? Or does that just dominate the Energy Industry as a whole? I visited your site and the front page was entirely Oil / Natural Gas

amerf14• 7 years ago

We’re focused on energy in general, but so far the users have been posting about hydrocarbons as that’s trending now considering where the oil price is now and where it’s headed. What did you think of the website

Let me know if you want me to send you an invite (email in my bio)

dhruvkar2• 7 years ago

https://spane.org

for social entrepreneur news

djstein• 7 years ago

hug of death?

dhruvkar2• 7 years ago

it's on a tiny server, looks to be back up.

bg4• 7 years ago

I've been enjoying reading KnowhereNews.com which attempts to provide bias-free news.

newswriter99• 7 years ago

I stand by SPIDR.

Found it via 4chan. Comments section get get a bit /pol/ but I think it adds a refreshing reminder of what the internet used to be like before we started posting our names and mugshots. http://spidr.today/

alt_f4• 7 years ago

alltop.com

armatav• 7 years ago

https://www.notdepressing.com

martin_a• 7 years ago

I set up my own FreshRSS instance and am adding more and more feeds to it. I found that suitable to give me a broad overview over news etc. But you will have to look for sources on your own, that's maybe a problem. Also less and less sites are using RSS/Atom.

smacktoward2• 7 years ago

The Memeorandum family of products have been the foundation of my media diet for more than a decade now:

Memeorandum (general news): https://www.memeorandum.com/

Techmeme (tech news): https://www.techmeme.com/

Mediagazer (media sector news): https://www.mediagazer.com/

I’m constantly amazed at how many people have never heard of them. To me, they are indispensable.

mgreg2• 7 years ago

I'd second Techmeme for tech news aggregation; great site and now with a newsletter too.

I actually built a general news aggregation newsletter inspired by Techmeme too (http://enclude.com) which uses ML to group the leading stories of the day together with the highest quality ones highlighted. My hope was to break people out of their filter bubble by exposing them to high quality coverage on the news of the day.

Did it as a daily email because I wanted it to be pushed to me and I wanted it to be limited meaning once you read it you're done. No need to suck up more time.

I've had no time to work on it and its in a state of disrepair but if anyone is interested in teaming up on it let me know.

t_mann2• 7 years ago

This looks great! Have you considered adding an RSS feed for it?

arkades• 7 years ago

What’s the political slant? I’m working my way down the memorandum front page articles and getting a very distinctly right wing vibe. Is that the norm, or just a momentary trend?

smacktoward2• 7 years ago

I literally have no idea how you're getting that. They play it pretty straight down the middle.

basch• 7 years ago

i prefer the river view for each, similar to hckrnews.com

https://www.techmeme.com/river

https://www.mediagazer.com/river

they also run one just about baseball - https://www.ballbug.com/

the world would be a better place if someone wrote a platform to make your own platforms of these. i imagine a community, like a subreddit, would have a set of rss feeds etc that it follows, a group of people "swipe left or right" on the stories, and the winners move up the page. the difference from other platforms being that stories dont get direct submitted, and that the editorial boards ranking the stories stay fairly small and specialized.

also shoutouts to https://redef.com http://www.aldaily.com https://longform.org https://longreads.com/ https://longreads.com/

Breza• 7 years ago

I second aldaily. An amazing website that I've loved for many years.

jyu• 7 years ago

I don't know any better way than using an RSS feed and adding unknowing curators for the domains of interest. Then you add and remove curators as you see fit. Journalists, commenters, niche forums, twitter, bloggers can all be added with some one time modifications.

If you like one curator's thoughts on subject X, they might introduce you to interesting thoughts on subject Y or Z.

Another interesting trick I haven't heard other people using is to send the media firehose to a folder, then only checking news that is 4+ weeks old. Aging the stories allows you to sift through puff pieces vs ones that have staying power and remain important.

slenk• 7 years ago

What's the best way to find new curators? I am sure there are great journalists on twitter, but I wouldn't know where to begin

ggttuu• 7 years ago

One option might be to use an ebook reader called 'Calibre' which also has a news aggregator built-in having over 1600 news sources from around the world.

rcarmo2• 7 years ago

I used to use Calibre and get fresh news on my Kindle every morning, back when there was no decent coverage in the subways...

scrollaway2• 7 years ago

I highly recommend Tildes. It's a small, tight-knit community, pretty well moderated. It's currently my favourite news aggregator.

https://tildes.net/

Email me if you want an invite.

aldoushuxley0013• 7 years ago

The first thread I opened up had a full discussion on how people on the right are either literally nazis or atleast effectively nazis... might be a bit too much of a small, tight-knit community for me.

Not bad looking UI though

scrollaway2• 7 years ago

I'm @Adys in that thread arguing against that FWIW, and the votes are essentially even. I find that there's very few "empty" discussions, and it's always possible to actually talk to people. But yeah, fair warning, this is a pretty strongly left-leaning site, and you'll have people with pretty strong opinions about it.

Tildes is also a wonderful community outside of political topics. But if you're looking for news aggregators specifically, most news will likely be political in some form, and have people arguing over politics in its comments. Hell, look at HN.

I agree on the UI btw. There's a few themes you can try as well. It's simplistic but practical.

rdlecler1• 7 years ago

We run AgFunderNews an set up feedit, a HN style channel covering external news on foodtech & agtech

https://feedit.agfunder.com/

fludlight• 7 years ago

This is cool but the color theme closely resembles one used by a popular ad network, so the whole site looks like ad-spam.

joeyrideout• 7 years ago

Newsmap is my go-to: https://newsmap-js.herokuapp.com/

It's a real-time graphical representation of the most popular news stories in a variety of topics in global or (configurable) regions. Very useful.

Shoutout to the original newsmap.jp which unfortunately requires Flash.

realshowbiz• 7 years ago

Bookmarked this. Found that it displayed several stories I had not seen, at a glance. Will try adding it to my phone scroll-hole rotation.

616c• 7 years ago

Definitely cribbing that expression!

a1z26• 7 years ago

what is scroll-hole rotation?

aldoushuxley0013• 7 years ago

That's the most unreadable thing I've seen in a long time

rcarmo2• 7 years ago

I had no idea that was still around, thanks!

It seems to get its news from Google, which means that (just like Google News) it makes a complete mess out of Portuguese news coverage by mixing in Brazilian ones...

unusximmortalis• 7 years ago

no Spain in the dropdown? :O :((

CapacitorSet• 7 years ago

Italian users might be interested in https://gambe.ro, a news aggregator to discuss the technical and social aspects of technology. Likewise, https://www.journalduhacker.net/ for French users.

Disclaimer: I'm a co-founder of gambe.ro.

henryboldi• 7 years ago

Hey! So I’ve been working on a news app, that like the others curates to your interests, but instead of emojis uses adjectives which are based on criteria. The idea is to filter out sensationalism engendered by the emoticon (and frankly addictive) rating system. Gem tends to recommend articles from the likes of NYT, The Atlantic, Nature, and Nautilus. Please check it out, and let me know your thoughts: https://exploregem.com

abstractbarista• 7 years ago

drudgereport.com

thekyle• 7 years ago

I've been running Hoxly News for a little while. It's a news aggregator that provides a small crowdsourced summary for each story.

https://news.hoxly.com

justhw• 7 years ago

Nice site. Did you build it using opensource software or custom? I'm looking to run similar site for a different niche.

rambojazz• 7 years ago

This question has been asked thousands of times. I suggest to build your own RSS feed, but other than this I read Hacker News, https://freepo.st and sometimes https://lobste.rs.

r562• 7 years ago

I made https://masskomm.com. It's a simple news aggregator for some of the main publishers I follow especially from around Asia.

aldoushuxley0013• 7 years ago

Nice work, I like the design too.

r562• 7 years ago

Thanks :)

sonicrocketman• 7 years ago

I run Pine.blog, a niche feed reader and blogging app and I’d love for it to get more attention:

https://pine.blog

It’s got more of a Twitter-like feel (timelines instead of folders) and a human curated directory of blogs and feeds to follow. If you’ve ever used Tweetbot, that’s what I’m going for.

Its available on the web or on iOS. And there’s a premium tier if you want more advanced features (and unlimited access to the API).

A major release is in the works that will add the ability to start a blog from Pine.blog so that you can quickly and easily contribute back to the open web on your own site. Right now you can post to a Wordpress blog if you have one.

tdevito• 7 years ago

I built a news app: https://gopulse.io/

t_mann2• 7 years ago

Maybe not exactly what you're looking for, but I've found personalized start pages (eg https://start.me/ https://www.protopage.com/ ) with RSS and other feeds from a wide variety of news sources to be the best fit for my purpose. This includes a feed for HN and other aggregators.

guybedo• 7 years ago

I built https://aktu.io, it's a rss reader with machine learning and news aggregation.

Main features are: - items in your rss feeds are automatically categorized, names of people, places, etc... extracted. That means it's way easier to browse/filter your feeds when you have thousands of articles waiting to be read...

- items in your rss feeds are grouped together if about the same story. It really helps to reduce the noise in your feeds as you don't have duplicates any more, and at the same time it's convenient to have different sources/point of views for articles in your feeds.

justinlilly• 7 years ago

barnacl.es is HN for bootstrappers, iirc.

bradezone• 7 years ago

I also made a newsmap.jp clone: https://news.brade.zone/

Used to be a bit better when google news told you how many articles existed per story (leading to more meaningful size differences), but it still gets the job done I guess.

Ask HN: What are some niche or alternative news aggregators worth checking out?

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