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What are some of your most frequently visited websites?
Aside from (formerly) Reddit and (now) Tildes, what are some of your favorite go-to websites whether for information, wasting time, etc.
Aside from (formerly) Reddit and (now) Tildes, what are some of your favorite go-to websites whether for information, wasting time, etc.
Interested in some smaller "upstart" news sources?
Puck.news -- "An extraordinary roster of generationally-talented authors covering the inside conversation at the center of Wall Street, Washington, Silicon Valley, Hollywood, and the media."
Semafor -- "Providing audiences with an unparalleled level of journalistic transparency through innovative new forms, cutting through the noise of the news cycle with smart, distilled views and exploring competing perspectives across borders for a curious, new global audience."
Bolts -- "Bolts is a digital magazine that covers the nuts and bolts of power and political change, from the local up. We report on the local elections and obscure institutions that shape public policy but are dangerously overlooked, and the grassroots movements that are targeting them."
The Emancipator — "The Emancipator is a reimagining of the first abolitionist newspaper in the United States with a focus on explaining and identifying solutions to structural racism. The publication is housed within the Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University and is provided without a paywall."
Defector -- "Defector is an employee-owned sports and culture website. We write about sports, politics, TV, movies, science, weird shit that happens on the internet, and anything else that catches our attention, because we believe that a good publication is one that reflects the genuine interests and obsessions of its staff."
To add to this, Naked Capitalism was created by finance professional Susan Weber who publishes under the nom de plume Yves Smith. She wrote an expose on derivitive financial instruments and the 2008 crisis called Econned. Her website does a twice daily aggregation of links to news from around the world, including but not limited to economic topics. She also writes and commissions long form investigative articles. Naked Capitalism did some groundbreaking investigative journalism about corruption and the CalPers California state retirement system and risky investment. The end of the news links always contains a cute animal photo or two.
In no particular order:
Those sites probably make up for >90% of my time online! I have a nice collection of smaller blogs that I have saved and occasionally check. I have been meaning to see if I can figure out how to set up an RSS feed that would get updates from all those in one convenient place, but haven't gotten around to it.
I always get frustrated with the Washington Post because I'll see an article that sounds really interesting every so often from a news feed and then get hit with the paywall when I go to read it. The thing is, I'm totally willing to pay the $4 a month or whatever it is they keep offering me but every time I sign up for a subscription the website is so broken it never actually takes the paywall down. I'm not sure if I'm individually cursed by the CEO or something, but it makes me miss the days of print media. I always have to end up searching for whatever the topic is and finding a similar articles on other sites.
AP, NPR, BBC, and Al Jazeera are all free. Personally I pay for the NYT as I'm not a big fan of WaPo's website layout, and the Times seems to have more complete coverage than I can find most other places.
wapo: check if someone posted the link at archive.ph already or another similar archive site. and then you can lump sum donate to them somehow when it works, I guess.
example article: "Find out just how bad wildfire smoke has been in your area"
archived link: https://archive.ph/g17MU
there's a firefox extension so it becomes one click as well.
That had never occured to me. Thanks for the tip, I'll definitely get that extension.
You can still get print subscriptions.
I subscribe to the New York Times in print. The amount of content I get out of it justifies the price.
I wish there was a way to pay a flat subscription way for a bundle of popular news websites such as NYT and WAPO for instance. I would absolutely be on board with something like that instead of having a bunch of separate accounts and payments to keep track of.
Hopefully someone will come up with something like this.
Probably when I am too old to care.
Apple News is close to what you're describing.
https://archive.ph/
I've tried to subscribe 3 times, on separate accounts, but it never seems to actually recognize I'm logged in when I try to read an article. It's like they don't want my money.
Can I get a lobster's invite? 🙃
Seconded
Metafilter! I had completely blanked on the name of the site, I could only remember what it looked like. Thank you so much for refreshing my memory.
I I used to lurk on MetaFilter about 10 years ago and just totally forgot about it over the years. Thanks for the reminder!
I spend more time on YouTube/Reddit than I care to admit.
tildes is part of my 12 step program.
--
for my contribution:
[edited for https ~thanks!]
don't forget your
httpson your links! :)I check Wikipedia and National Today every morning before starting work. It’s fun seeing what random thing is celebrated everyday.
National Today looks great, thanks for sharing!
Last year I did a weekly National Today post as a discussion topic for work. They’re interesting and often there is a holiday that is just so out there, it strikes up a lot of discussion.
So my evening wind down is
RedditTildesI use Refind daily but I don't spend too much time on it. Refind is sort of a personalized link aggregator (mostly articles), but it only shows you a limited number of links a day. You can still search topics to find more links but it's meant to limit the information you consume to a reasonable amount instead of going for an endless scroll. The week resets every Sunday, so if you don't check it that week, those suggestions are gone. It also limits the number of suggestions if you haven't used it in a while, which is also a unique feature.
Very interesting, I’m going to check that out.
Thanks for the link
Thank you for the link. I just subscribed.
What a great share. I subscribed. :)
Hmm, this looks interesting. I might use this to replace the "news" I used to get from Reddit.
I like to check IsThereAnyDeal and GG every couple of days to make sure I'm not missing any good game deals.
Oh boy, it's not often I get to sort my Firefox history by visit count. How exciting!
Arbitrarily ordered:
YouTube, Nebula, Reddit, various wikis, various search engines
Various search engines? What do you use each one for...?
By default I search with DuckDuckGo or Brave Search. Sometimes that doesn’t find a decent result so I might move to Bing or Google instead. I generally find Google to be better for very specific niche questions. Oddly enough adding the word “Reddit” to a query on Google usually provides better quality answers than it would otherwise.
I’ve started experimenting with using LLMs / ChatGPT etc for some of these questions instead of searching for the answer. Results are mixed. It does seem like Google search result quality is trending down.
Interesting.
Despite it conflicting with every internet usage standard I hold myself to, I can’t seem to shake my habit of using Google search. I don’t know what it is but none of the other engines seem... “right” to me. Granted, I don’t spend that much time looking for stuff online, I’ve already got most of my bookmarks are whatnot. It’s something I should probably work on lmao.
For me, the issue is more that as much as I gave DDG or Bing (granted, that's largely the same results) a try, they don't really work well.
True, if you put "generatable" questions into Google (say you ask for one specific puzzle in a video game) you'll find pages of sites that seemingly have a 15000 words article for every single item of every single game, because that's what they generated to appear first in Google's algorithm.
But, not only does the same happen on DDG - naturally, they're no smarter about filtering these out - but for specialist knowledge questions Google just performs better because it knows what I might be after. For example it knows that Java is a programming language to me, not an island or a coffee, so I don't have to type 'Java programming language' every time to specify that. Which is handy, if a very lame example.
I feel Google really needs to get a grip on generated pages though. Just run detector software and toss them all out, entirely. Even adding 'reddit' is no longer helpful (same on DDG) because now the bots are posting those AI-generated entries to reddit, too!
I have subscriptions to the NYT and the Boston Globe. I read the daily editions of the papers on their respective websites most days.
If I'm looking to purchase something, I'll look it up on both Wirecutter and Consumer Reports.
For just mindless browsing, YouTube and up until yesterday reddit. Lots and lots of time on reddit. Actually quite looking forward to doing more productive things with that time now.
Reddit and YouTube, but I am trying to cut back. Other daily visits:
Hacker News and Lobsters for developer and FOSS news.
Mastodon for social media, but I'm also checking out kbin in light of recent Reddit events.
What is the best way to get an initiation (invite) ?
I don't actually have an account and participate only as a reader, so I can't say for sure.
The best approach might be to ask another Lobsters member you personally know (if any). Or maybe somebody here has an invitation to give you?
I'm not looking for an invitation myself. I'm happy just reading.
Thanks, already got the invite from another user and joined.
The Arch Linux wiki and youtube mainly. Reddit still while I still have time. But I'm kind of excited for that to change. My life has been on a new trajectory lately.
Artstation
So many cool pictures on there.
MangaDex
My main (only) source for my favourite manga series (Nagatoro, MiA, Mieruko-chan, etc.)
AnimeSuki
Where I'll likely be going to discuss anime from now on with reddit being fossilized.
ScribbleMaps
Public knowledge map on the war in Ukraine.
Project Owl OSINT's custom google map on the war in Ukraine
Shows more information, including unit names and such, also how much area has been flooded by the destruction of the Nova Khakova Dam.
Reddit live thread on the war in Ukraine
Probably been my most visited page in the past year and some.
In no real order, I mainly go on:
I regularly check Netrider and the Whirlpool forums, both reasonably active Australian forums with a primary focus on motorcycles and tech respectively.
I also like to check OzBargain semi regularly to see if any good deals have popped up (as you might guess by the name this too is an Australian website).
+1 for OzBargain, but I suggest you set up a keyword notification system otherwise you could spend half your life trawling for menial "deals" only to have a small handful of them being worth your time. Aussie aussie aussie.
I've noticed a few people asking about memes in the reddit influx, so I'll throw out iwastesomuchtime.com for anyone who's looking for a new source.
I enjoy the Straight Dope message board. It's a forum set up with thoughtful discussions.
I've participated there for close to ten years now.
In no particular order:
Reddit/Tildes
Twitter
ESPN
Anilist
Mangadex + other manga sites
Youtube
XKCD
Lishogi
YouTube and NYT usually, sometimes WSJ