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Techmeme founder Gabe Rivera works in his home office in San Francisco, Calif., on Friday, Sept. 17, 2010.
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ZDNET's key takeaways
- Techmeme celebrates two decades.
- This tech news site remains popular for tech pros.
- Unlike other content sites, Techmeme is growing its audience.
For tech news, we'd prefer you use ZDNET, but we know many of you turn to Reddit, Bluesky, Mastodon, or Hacker News. However, as Crazy Stupid Tech reports, "Every morning nearly 100,000 geeks worldwide, including some of the richest tech barons in the universe, fire up one of the most dated-looking websites online:" Techmeme.
Techmeme is a technology news aggregator that launched in September 2005. Founded by Gabe Rivera, the site remains an independent, self-funded project and is widely recognized as an excellent source for real-time tech news summaries and discussion threads.
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Now, Techmeme is not a news site per se. Its tiny staff of three full-time editors and 23 part-time editors doesn't write news. They gather the site's stories from across the web in as close to real-time as possible and sort them by hotness and importance.
People like me, other journalists, and tech executives such as Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg use Techmeme to see what's happening in the tech world. You're welcome to hang out there, too.
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Techmeme began as "tech.memeorandum" on Sept. 12, 2005. Yeah, I know it wasn't a great name. Thanks to adoption among influential bloggers and tech enthusiasts, the site was rebranded as Techmeme the following year and given its own domain name. From the outset, the platform's core goals were to let the web itself serve as the editor, uncover new sources quickly, and connect related conversations for a holistic view of each story.
Techmeme's aggregation technology combines automated crawling and ranking algorithms with human editorial oversight. It collects articles and blog posts from thousands of outlets, identifies the most influential and referenced pieces, and clusters related coverage for easy navigation.
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While its early years were purely automated, human editors joined in 2008 to help manage headlines and editorial decisions. Since 2023, Techmeme has further expanded its conversation sourcing to include not only tweets but posts from forums and other social networks, reflecting shifts in tech industry discourse.
Unlike other news aggregator sites, such as Slashdot and Digg, which have declined in popularity over the years, Techmeme has remained popular. Indeed, Riviera claims, "Traffic is up 25% this year."
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So, why the continued growth? Riviera thinks it may be because people need one place to see the hottest AI news. That's rather ironic since Google AI Overviews have been wrecking traffic at most content sites.
The growth might also be because Techmeme, which still has one of the most boring-looking interfaces on the web, has maintained a clear and easy-to-read design. Finally, the site still attracts executives and influencers who want to know what's happening in tech.
Techmeme has been successful for 20 years, and I suspect that even with AI-enabled news summaries, it could make another 20 years.
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