Aside from some special-interest forums, I've ended up reading just HN. (Warm thanks to you guys for being my filtering function.) One by one, I dropped follo

Aside from some special-interest forums, I've ended up reading just HN. (Warm thanks to you guys for being my filtering function.) One by one, I dropped following various news sites from my Mozilla toolbar. I must say I never really bought into the RSS boom as the best sites I read were pretty simple and looked much like a beautified RSS layout. First went Slashdot. This was years ago, about the time Reddit started. Reddit lost it last year: too congested with useless links with a low signal to noise ratio. I've been dropping many of my national news sites, too -- tech news and otherwise -- leaving only those of best quality. Then I dropped them as well because nothing much in the mainstream doesn't really interest me. This was a big thing I had to accept. I really don't have to know the details of some crisis that is 5000km away no matter how civilized or educated that may be considered; if I start hearing about a major change in the given situation only then I'll look up for some more news. Last spring I dropped reading the website of the main newspaper in Finland. The news were mostly uninteresting except maybe for some local things. I still check their news listing maybe once a week but I rarely read any news items. I realized that I'll hear about anything important from other people anyway. So I'm effectively using my friends and co-workers as a live filter. TV and TV news I dropped 10 years ago. So HN it is. Then, plus a few web forums / mailinglists but those provide a mix of both information and connections to people. People are usually more interesting than the latest "facts" of random subjects.