The Onion, but for tech Twitter: sites like it, ranked

The best sites like The Onion each pick one world and make fun of it in the voice of a straight newspaper. If your world is tech, start with TechTwitter IO, a free satirical daily paper about tech Twitter; the rest of this list covers general, punk and British satire.

All five below label themselves as satire or humor on their own pages. None of them is a news source, and that is the point.

TechTwitter IO: the tech Twitter daily

TechTwitter IO prints one edition a day, laid out like a broadsheet. The motto on the masthead is "All the Takes That Fit, We Print" and the price line reads "Free (You Are the Product)". Sections run from the Front Page and The Timeline through Markets, Launches, The Leaderboards, Opinion, Incident Report and Page 404, then Living, Classifieds and Fun & Games.

What makes it work as an Onion-style read is the furniture around the stories. Each edition has a Discourse Forecast, a Main Character of the Day, an editorial board that has opinions about IPO filings, letters to the editor, fake classified ads, horoscopes sorted by stack (Frontend, Backend, DevOps) and an advice column called Dear Senior Engineer.

The jokes sit on top of real events. Stories often link the report they riff on, and the footer spells out the rule: unless a post links to its source, the people, posts and quotes are parody or invented. Treat the linked source as the news and the paper as the joke.

Two extras round it out: a Fun & Games page with daily puzzles, and The Morgue, an archive of every back issue by date.

ClickHole: internet culture

ClickHole bills itself as the place where all content deserves to go viral. Its tagline points at viral content rather than politics. Its footer uses the same rule as The Onion: invented names except for public figures being satirized, and not meant for readers under 18.

The Hard Times: punk and hardcore

The Hard Times calls itself a punk and hardcore satire site and asks readers to treat all content as parody. If you spent your teens at shows, its jokes are written for you in a way a national paper's are not.

The Daily Mash: British satire

The Daily Mash describes itself as a satirical website of spoof articles that are all made up. It is rude, it swears, and it says you must be over 18 to read it.

McSweeney's Internet Tendency: daily humor writing

McSweeney's is less a fake newspaper than a daily humor site, "almost every day since 1998" in its own words. Pick it when you want humor writing rather than fake headlines.

Quick comparison

The Onion is still the right pick for general news

If you want national politics, sports and everyday American life, stay with The Onion. Its site keeps articles going back to early 1996, has sections for news, local, politics, entertainment and sports, and sends a free daily newsletter. The sites above are narrower by design. TechTwitter IO is the pick when the thing you want mocked is the timeline you already scroll every morning.

How to read satire without getting fooled

Satire works best when you know it is satire. Before you share a screenshot, check the site's footer or about page; every site here says plainly that it makes things up. On TechTwitter IO, a story with a source link points to the real event, and everything else is the bit.