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Which other sites do you visit?
The internet is starting to feel smaller and smaller, or at least the content I find is less interesting or created with the goal to be sponsored.
Nowadays, I basically consume downloaded content, books, shows, mainly old stuff found on the internet archive
Which other sites do you find interesting and worth it?
Dropout.tv which is a paid comedy streaming service. But that does sell it a bit short as the shows are of a wide variety including things like Dimension 20.
I sometimes browse RoyalRoad to see if I can find a hidden gem there. Most work there, even popular work, is of low quality imho but there is some good reading material to be found.
I frequent a dutch tech websites including the forum they have.
I also consume content youtube, netflix, etc. I have a bunch of webcomics in my rss reader, as well as one or two blogs
Uh, I browse Hacker News which is mostly a cesspit of VC hungry startup wannabes, the over the top unhinged AI hype crowd and general tech bros. But it also does keep me a bit informed about some aspects of the tech world. Don't really recommend it though unless you take a huge container of salt grains with you.
Then finally a few news websites. I think that is about it for the website I most often frequent these days.
There are others like wikipedia if I come across something interesting and want just a high level overview. But that is less frequent.
Btw, in ~tech you might find this article that was posted interesting: Forums are still alive, active, and a treasure trove of information
Yeah these days I find HN way more annoying to sort through than it used to be but mostly because of the proliferation of AI hype. The techbroism is just turned up to 11 now. I mean I shouldn't be surprised given the site's origins/ownership/etc but it feels fundamentally worse now than before. I always found it a nice way to get a very quick aggregate of tech headlines, opinions, research, and sometimes novel things being worked on but these days I just kinda get sad and close the tab. If I could simply filter AI links out the site would probably improve 10x (or be a ghost town)
This is probably all more of a personal thing specifically to me though, because as someone that has loved and been into tech all my life, the techbros and AI have really soured me on it all a lot. There's so much noise and garbage that have moved in and taken over
Lobste.rs has suffered some from this but a but less given its programming focus, so sometimes I will still skim through there.
Very interested in checking out the forum link/article tho! And +1 for dropout. I haven't subscribed yet on an ongoing basis but have watched plenty of their stuff and it's great
I really miss the culture of technology 20 or so years ago.
Back when Bill Gates was pretty much universally agreed to be a greedy asshole by most people in the field, most people dreamed of an open source future, and there was enthusiasm for the technology because of how interesting it was.
Now it seems like the modern day equivalents of Bill Gates (Jeff Bezos, Tim Cook, etc) are lauded for being forward thinking geniuses for their ability to make as much money as they have. Enthusiasm for technology has been mostly replaced by enthusiasm for how much money technology can make you, and closed source cloud hosted SaaS apps where you don't even get to see the executables, let alone the source code, are the thing most people are excited about.
I always wonder if the kinds of people that were into technology back then have changed, or have they been replaced by an entirely different kind of person.
Like if I were born 15 years ago instead of 40, would I have still been interested in computers enough to get into the field? Or would I have been turned off by the culture as it currently exists and decided to do something else?
I'm delighted to hear you watch dropout! That's a favorite in my house :) Mostly just Game Changer, Very Important People, and Make Some Noise. Despite enjoying playing D&D, I've never been able to get into watching others play it.
DROPOUT IS THE BEST STREAMING SERVICE
Cough ahem. Sorry about that.
It honestly is. Everything on it is quality, even if I don’t watch all of it. And it’s dirt cheap. Plus Sam’s business practices with profit sharing and paying for auditions is really refreshing. It’s basically everything I hoped Comedy Bang! Bang! Would turn into years ago.
Game changer is probably my favorite show on the entire platform. Make Some Noise is also a favorite. Dimension 20 really depends on the campaign and if I am feeling it to be honest. So I have watched some seasons of it and some I haven't.
For most of the other shows it, I mostly just pick episodes that appeal to me.
I paid for just Game Changer when they had their "buy now before the price goes up" -sale.
Since then I've discovered: Make Some Noise, Gastronauts, Smartypants and Um Actually - and still haven't caught up on those.
I feel the same. Except for Harmon Quest, I thought that was funny.
Yes, same! I think the animation and short episode lengths helped it click for me a lot. For other offerings, I find it really daunting to get into something that's essentially 2+ hr long episodes of people just sitting around the table. Which is something I love doing, but not necessarily watching.
Harmon Quest had the perfect mix of actual play, comedy and the animated bits was the perfect spice on top.
I'm also a huge fan of those shows!
I love Dropout content but the lack of streaming client on the PS5 makes it tough for my household to enjoy it.
You can also subscribe via YouTube. I assume there's a YT client on PS5.
I think that's a Vimeo issue, but I'm not sure if that's the only factor
I love D20 clips, and I even watched some full episodes, but it’s just too time consuming. I fell off quick. Game Changer, Make Some Noise, VIP, SmartyPants, and Game Parlor are my faves. The latter three are hit or miss but fun.
I was going to point to the same tildes post. That post with all the forums just became my new favorite.
Wikipedia. It’s great to just jump from article to article via hyperlinks. You started out reading about a random bird that was the featured article and now you’re reading an article on how airplanes fly just by jumping around. It’s like Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon but without an end goal!
I also check the Associated Press regularly for news.
Internet Archive is also a great place to get hard to find media. I can’t even count how many books you can’t easily access otherwise. After watching a documentary about the development of the CED (a vinyl record that could play video), I was able to find an obscure book mentioned in the video on the Internet Archive.
On Wikipedia, I'll give a shout out to their mobile app being surprisingly good. It's got a daily "Which came first?" game, wiki pages for nearby locations, picture of the day, featured articles, and suggestions based off of previously read articles. With so many apps being worse versions of websites just created to get more user data, it's pretty great to see one that actually is a better experience.
Holy crap, you weren't kidding. The app is fantastic!
I check AP most days, but I also use NPR and the BBC for news.
I seem to spend a lot of time on Youtube. I do this without logging into my Google account, unless I want to upvote a video or subscribe. Then I immediately log out. And I often use a second browser, one set to never remember history, to watch some favorite channels, like Y Pictures, The Try Channel and Movies with Mary. Waterfox works for this, since U Block Origin works with it as well as it does in Firefox.
I also checkout NPR especially listening to the Moth Podcast. If you haven’t listened to it you should try.
It’s about story telling but from a completely different angle.
I went to a live show for the Moth podcast in Indianapolis! It was really interesting to hear and see all the storytellers. I'm not sure if they recorded and will upload the one we went to, but it was fun. Three of the storytellers were obviously skilled and well-practiced (actually I found an article by one of them that had his story almost word-for-word for how he told it, which seriously impressed me) and the fourth was a mechanic who wasn't as practiced, but it added to the charm.
Of the ones I saw, I really hope the one about the mime gets broadcast. That storyteller was an old lady and at the start she had one of those quiet, almost frail voices, to the point I worried that she'd have trouble talking loud enough for a long time. My worries were for nothing. Surreal to see an old lady who you saw have to be helped onto the stage holler "COME AT ME MOTHERFUCKERS!"
I use wikitok on android sometimes, just scrolling wiki articles on random.
MetaFilter's been around forever and still has a core community with quality moderation, I like to go through their Best Of page from time to time when I'm not visiting it regularly.
Are there any alternative UI options for this site? It seems like they have good content but I find it very difficult to read for some reason
They have RSS https://rss.metafilter.com/metafilter.rss
I didn't share what I visit initially to not devoid the conversation into my own sites, basically most of my reading comes from manually curated RSS over the years using inoreader, mainly tech, indie blogs, or culture related, personal blogs are the ones that feel more humanly written, for a while I had the rule of only following people who create and not those who simply consume, while I still get the best content from RSS, most sites are dying, based in the last publication dates or the rate of publishing.
Then Hacker News, Tildes, next-episode.net and YouTube. For mainstream socials I have Instagram where I only follow close friends and don't use any of the other doomscrolling features.
I gave up on Reddit, I probably grew up from the need of every comment needing to be funny, I bet there are still some niche parts but as a whole the platform is terrible, I still visit from time to time /r/videos using my own client and their JSON API mostly to find new shows to watch.
What I would like to find more is sites like Hundredrabbits or the already mentioned lowtechmagazine, people passionate about what they do with the goal of sharing that knowledge and without the enshittification found in other platforms, I wish everyone simply had their own domain, and post anything they want with RSS.
Other sites that help me find something to read: The dailywebthing archives, Pinboard, Bear blog
Without linking any, my views of piracy have shifted over the years, now I illegally download first what I want and if it was worth it I buy it physically, specially with books, there's no way I would get into subscriptions for content I don't need.
Lobste.rs, HackerNews, Bluesky in that order. Even though HN/BS have gone downhill in quality for different reasons, I still open them up out of muscle memory. Most of the time I don’t even like what I see on either.
Lobsters is like HackerNews without VC nonsense and better moderation. I think the discussions on lobsters are better because it’s invite only.
I’ve been trying to branch out into the fediverse, or even the tildeverse, but I haven’t found my crowd. I’m curious if anyone has advice for finding a community in those realms when the pool is so big.
Well, most of the posts are devoid of discussion of any kind. I'm not sure that's better. The ones that get traction can be interesting but they're rare, IME
Yeah, it’s disappointing when a good link doesn’t have any comments. But I think it’s a fair trade off for the reduction in noise.
I visit the wikis for various games, online stores, the website for my health insurance company, and YouTube for entertainment/news. There's not a lot of visiting random websites unless someone makes a fun little toy website, and even then I find that through word of mouth.
What do you do on your health insurance web site aside from health insurance business?
I've got Kaiser Permanente for health insurance, and they've got almost all medical care in house. So I can email my primary care physician, see when my appointment with the sleep medicine department is, contest the bill for a CT scan, and reorder my medications all in the one website.
Reddit, YouTube and Tildes are 90% of my sfw browsing.
Sometimes I'll hop on Twitch for chess/smash/cs/league tournaments. I also visit streaming sites for MMA/sports, but that's about it.
I kinda see your point about the centralized internet, but even back in 2005-2006, when I first started browsing every day, I never had the experience that people talk about. I still only browsed a couple of sites and went back to gaming. I used to visit some science sites, some photo sites, MMO-Champion, but I never used stumbleupon, tumblr or myspace, so my experience hasn't changed much since then. Pretty much all "discovery" sites are replaced by good youtube videos these days. The quality of documentary-style videos have skyrocketed in the last 7-8 years and I think it's way more fun than the mindless browsing I did back then. But that's just my opinion.
I still have a few YouTube channels I like, so YouTube, but I don’t really watch the random recommended videos unless it’s someone I already know.
I also like Nebula. It’s mostly similar content to YouTube but a platform by and for the creators. I bought a lifetime subscription the first time they did them and I think I’ve already waged money compared to if I’d done monthly. My favorite here is Jet Lag: The Game, though those are also posted to YouTube a week later.
Finally, I like lobste.rs for tech stuff, sometimes. It’s got some of the same issues creesch mentions HackerNews having, though.
As an honorable mention, I have a FreshRSS instance that I host and I like reading some newsletters on there, but not sure if that really counts as a site for this purpose. :)
Added many of these to a folder in my bookmarks to see if any of them stick - lots of fun ones! Thank you to everyone for sharing their internet goodies.
Some other sites I've enjoyed, other than many already mentioned:
https://www.deceptive.design/hall-of-shame - Poor practices by companies, usually digital ones
https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com - Their website that runs fully on solar!
Lowtechmagazine is amazing, great to see it mentioned in this thread.
While my main sites are Tildes, YouTube, BlueSky, Wikipedia as well as some Dutch news sites, there's another one I recommend every now and then:
mynoise
Fantastic for background noise, which I use basically every day at work.
HackerNews, lobste.rs and slashdot.org. I find it amazing that Slashdot is still alive and pretty well curated after all these years.
I haven't visited /. in years, but it used to be quite exciting when you got mod points. Do they still have the power to slashdot other servers now? I shouldn't think so
Hehe, I think those days are over, although they sometimes link to someone’s hobby site which has limited bandwidth 😅
I too still read most of the posts that go through /., but man, I wouldn't call it well-curated lol. There are still dupes posted every week, and zero effort summaries. Every few months I get to learn about TIOBE's most recent googling of programming language names. Fringe scientific "discoveries" made by whackadoodles still sometimes get posted. But, it seems to be mostly by and for greybeards who like the tech, whereas HN feels younger and way way shallower. I'll take the occasional "electric universe" quackery over money-obsessed 22 year olds reinventing the wheel.
Also, on /. some psychotic right wingers had been very prominent in the comments for a few years, but then blessedly that seemed to die down some, maybe earlier this year? But it seems to be ticking back up sadly.
Fair, but my bar is pretty low. As long as it still feels human-curated and avoids blatant spam, it’s good enough. I haven’t looked at the comments section in ages :)
I’m surprised Lemmy, Mbin and Piefed are not on here as Reddit alternatives. I spend most of my time either here or Lemmy.
I was wondering why I hadn't seen a mention of the fediverse yet, glad to see there are at least 2 of us.
I’m there too, mostly to scratch the doomscroll itch. How do you feel about the content and vibe there? The content can sometimes be a bit too negative for me, but then I’m also just browsing the front page. That was also a mistake on Reddit.
When I first joined I assumed I’d be okay with all the mix of the ideologies, but I will admit I was wrong. It leads to a lot of random debates. It does turn very negative and political.
So outside of Reddit, YouTube, and Tildes, my mains are ChatGPT for occasional help with formatting and various tasks, but I'm working on locally hosting my own LLM and AI agents to move away on reliance on ChatGPT for various transcription stuff.. I'll browse Google News too.
For my hobbies I'll browse 3D Printing sites like Printables, Thingiverse, Makersworld, Yegi, etc. Also TheRPF.com, but it's not as active anymore.
I'm also on Github quite a bit too.
I really really wish there were more sites available to browse. I've been meaning to set up an RSS feed server and finding more blogs.
As far as random time wasters go:
Often arstechnica. I can’t even remember how I came across it but it’s ingrained in muscle memory now. I quit hacker news due to the techbro unpleasant culture and too much focus on AI. I tried lobsters briefly but I just found it a bit dry tbh.
Wikipedia, my RSS feed (pretty much all world news), a local-community Discord group ... rarely, youtube when I get an itch for a song (I just now had to listen to Little Richard's Good Golly, Miss Molly) ... but more and more these days, when I get that itch, I just go download the whole album.
Actually, most of my time online these days is spent downloading info and media, for future reference.
Discuit is my other "scroll" site. They have more low effort content than Tildes and I have to more severely curate my feed with blocks. But it's decent for some memes and I find some news there sooner than Tildes.
Social: Tildes, Reddit, Facebook (For marketplace only), YouTube for Second Wind/Yahtzee.
News: Globe and Mail, CBC, New York Times, Substack (Paul Wells, The Line) Canadaland, The Atlantic, The Tyee
Unshakable teenage habits: IGN.com, Segabits, Polygon (but it royally sucks now).
That's really it. I'm happy to say that I sleuth the web less than I used to, but my habitual spots are super uninspiring.
I left Reddit around the election and since then I basically spend my time in tildes, Wikipedia, and lately I've been spending time shopping for books. So good reads, American book warehouse, basically anything that isn't Amazon.
I'm not proud, I still go to reddit via the Old U.I.. I use Mastodon a lot. YouTube. Facebook ( friends and family ).
So I still check Reddit (mostly a search results page for topics with "title:update" because I like closure dammit), read fanfics on Archive of Our Own, and also use Discord regularly (recently joined a horror manga server and having a blast there).
Here's some other sites people might like!
Also: I made this post last year asking people about other sites that aren't about news or current events. So you can find some fun ones there, too.
I think I might be the only person here that actively uses TikTok. But that’s probably the place I spend the most time online now unfortunately.
Reddit but I primarily only use the r/boxoffice subreddit, which is a pretty good aggregate for Hollywood news.
YouTube, there’s still some video essays I find interesting. And I usually play a long form video to fall asleep.
Letterboxd and Twitter (unfortunately). I kind of want to stop using Twitter. There’s some people whose commentary I enjoy (mostly on movies but on culture in general). But I get so many tweets that irk me or exhaust me. It’s also mostly right-winged content as opposed to the primarily left wing content we got in 2020. Apparently the absolute only thing we should do in life is get married and have kids by 25 otherwise you’re a loser hippie. It’s kind of odd in general.
I don’t want to move to Bluesky because I don’t really enjoy that it’s essentially a time portal to the landscape of the late 2010s “uhm this is problematic sweaty” stuff. So im hoping eventually I just stop logging on twitter.
Basically just Tildes and my RSS reader these days. I killed my socials years ago when the algorithmic feeds rendered them useless for keeping up with friends. Even my YouTube consumption is moderated through RSS subscriptions these days because boy oh boy are those suggestions scary.
I used to monitor my local city and state subreddits but those degenerated into years-old karma farming bot reposts and Nextdoor-quality flamewars over the past few years. And, let's be real, they weren't high quality content to begin with.
Books have been really nice lately. Been trying to reread all of Neal Stephenson's work, and slowly working my way through Robert Caro's nonfiction.
The internet ain't what it used to be when I could spend all day on Reddit or Facebook messenger.
mobileread.com - a general e-reading forum mostly tuned to hardware and calibre(ebook management sw)
opengameart.org - also a forum but mostly a repository of permissive license game assets
archiveofourown.org - fiction but mostly fanfiction site
royalroad.com - fiction site. Generally litrpgs and generally direct to Amazon hopefuls but there are several gems present. Some of them migrated from their own sites
forums.sufficientvelocity.com, forums.spacebattles.com fiction, fanfiction and quest(collaborative, at least those I follow, online fiction format) sites. Though I am mostly there for specific stories
dropout.tv - streaming service of generally improv comedy
Basically mostly tildes, a search engine, and wikipedia. Also @faye_luna's website because it's cute.
I spend an unhealthy amount of time browsing the Steam storefront, and occasionally checking in on my friends' game play activity. I only buy games infrequently, compared to the much larger time I spend on just browsing and organizing my wishlist
Nebula, Bluesky, reddit, LinkedIn, Wikitree, various news sites, and I very occasionally browse Hacker News.
Other than lurking around here, it's mostly old reddit for a few heavily curated subreddits that have content that's hard to find elsewhere. I've recently started using Khan Academy to work through some subjects I'm interested in, and I'm trying to be a bit more mindful about directing myself there when I'm teetering on the edge of doomscroll mode. I also have a habit of digging super deep into amazon or other online store reviews when I get interested in a new item, even if it isn't something I actually intend to purchase. It's just nice to know things about things
Edit: I also stumbled across the PBS Eons channel on Youtube a few days ago and I'm absolutely obsessed
There's something liberating about realizing you can learn things just to learn them.