Social News Websites for Front-End Developers

A social news website is a community-driven site where users can share links to news, articles and resources they’ve found on the Internet. Members of the social news website vote on the user-contributed content, acting in unison to create a self-governing quality-control mechanism for the site. If you’re a person with an unappeasable appetite for Web content, social news websites will indulge your hunger.

There are social news websites that are specifically about front-end develoment and web design. Here’s a list of them:

Versioning

Versioning is a new social news site that SitePoint launched a little over a month ago (July 2015)¹. The idea for creating Versioning stems from SitePoint’s daily email newsletter that goes by the same name.

Front-end Front

“Front-end Front is a place where front-end developers can ask questions, share interesting links, and show their work to the rest of the community.

Have you heard of Hacker News or Designer News? It’s something like that, but focused more on front-end.” ²

Frontends

Frontends is a community site where you can share your work, get help and “get better at building websites.” Also, the site allows you to post links in order to “share good content you find in the web”.³

Echo JS

This social news website is “focused on JavaScript development, HTML5, and front-end news.”⁴

Pineapple

Pineapple is a community-driven social news site centered on tools and tutorials for developers and designers.

Web Designer News

Web Designer News was built “to provide web designers and developers with a single location to discover the latest and most significant stories on the Web.”⁵ Unlike other social news sites though, the user-contributed links need to be approved by moderators of the site before they get posted.

Designer News

You’ve most likely heard of Designer News — the Hacker News for designers⁶. If not, here’s a quick summary: DN is “a community of people in design and technology”. The site hosts user-contributed “designer-friendly content”⁷.

DesignFloat

DesignFloat has been around since 2007⁸, making it one of the oldest social news sites dedicated to web design.

reddit

Every day, at least 3 million users⁹ go to reddit to find user-contributed links and participate in community discussions.

reddit isn’t just a social news site for devs and designers though, so you’ll have to go to subreddits — which are user-created sub-sections of the site that’s focused on a particular topic — to discover front-end development and web design links. For starters, check out the /r/webdev and /r/web_design subreddits.

DZone

DZone has a social news section that allows users of the site to submit links to web development news, tutorials and resources.

You’ll discover plenty of JavaScript and CSS content on DZone.

Other Social News Websites to Check Out

The following list of social news sites aren’t specifically for front-end web developers and web designers, but you’ll still often find relevant and interesting links on them:

• Hacker News
• BetaList
• GrowthHackers
• Product Hunt

Footnotes

1. At the time of writing, the first Versioning post dates back a little over a month ago.
2. The quoted description came from Front-end Front’s About page.
3. The quoted description came from Frontends’s About page.
4. The quoted description came from Echo JS’s About page.
5. The quoted description came from Web Designer News’s About page.
6. When Designer News was first posted on Hacker News, the most voted comment referred to the Designer News as “HN for designers.” Designer News has many Hacker-News analogs such as the “Show DN” and “Ask DN” posts, which are the equivalents of “Show HN” and “Ask HN” posts.
7. The quoted description came from Designer News’s About page.
8. The copyright notice at the footer of DesignFloat says “Design Float © 2007-2014”, which implies the website was launched in 2007.
9. reddit’s About page shows real-time stats. When I checked it for this article, reddit’s stats reveal that there were 3,179,674 logged in redditors.

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Jacob Gube is the founder of Six Revisions. He’s a front-end developer. Connect with him on Twitter.