[noobermin]

This might be funny, but I learned about HN on slashdot I believe, and found it was similar but with a much better signal-to-noise ratio in the comments and actually did a better job of living up to the reputation that slashdot had.

[labster]

I think I may have come here from /. too, but I can't really remember now. I stopped reading Slashdot a few months later. HN really is news for hackers, stuff that matters. Slashdot had become a bunch of in-jokes, sensationalism, and entertainment news. I don't want that, I want to know what problems people out there are solving.

[auxym]

Also here from slashdot. It was around when they introduced the "Web 2.0"-style redesign and a whole lot of people were complaining about it. One commenter linked to HN as an alternative, and it didn't take me very long to switch over.

[jfultz]

I don't remember how I first heard about HN, but I came here from SlashDot, too. At some point, I realized that /. was too many fluff posts (I can't say now exactly what the "fluff" was, but the perception was very strong for me), too few posts that I was interested in, and that I had just grown tired of trying to dig any gems out of comments that had become increasingly toxic, boring, or irrelevant.

I remember when I first visited HN, after an initial bit of confusion, I realized two important things. First, there was no stream to follow...no need to feel like I had to "catch up". Second, I could scan 30 posts in the same time it took me to scan maybe 6 /. posts. The presentation was just so much more clean and efficient.

After about a week, I noticed a third really important thing. For the first time in ages, I felt like I was actually finding out about tech news as it happened instead of being days-to-weeks behind the leading edge. I was spending the same time/effort on HN that I had on /. (and mostly just staying in the top 60 posts), but getting much more for it.

That having been said, HN ain't perfect. Probably my biggest annoyance is the prevalence of links to paywalled and/or adblocker-hostile sites. But as far as news selection, I dumped /. just days after coming here and I've never looked back.

[Zircom]

>or the first time in ages, I felt like I was actually finding out about tech news as it happened instead of being days-to-weeks behind the leading edge.

That's exactly why I migrated here from slashdot. I read both for a few months and was finding I'd see something on HN and then see the same exact thing on slashdot days or weeks later.

What eventually made me switch completely was the way comments work here don't encourage the inane, offtopic, uninventive, dead-horse-beating karma-farming injokes and references that slashdot and reddit seem to be inundated with[1]. Not to mention I find it utterly charming how often someone else will post something and the author/creator pops into the comments section to chime in "Hey that's me, would love to answer any questions you guys have". Nowhere else like it on the internet I've ever seen.

[1]Not to say I don't occasionally enjoy the occasionally silly comment, but I find the ones on HN to be a lot more tasteful and actually witty as opposed to the rout cookie cutter memes and references that are found on every single tangentially related reddit or slashdot thread that people can think to post them to.