It would be nice to correlate this with people who have "Show Dead" turned on, but this is a start. Polls suffer from selection bias, but it might be interesting.
Pick whichever is closest ...
It would be nice to correlate this with people who have "Show Dead" turned on, but this is a start. Polls suffer from selection bias, but it might be interesting.
Pick whichever is closest ...
50 comments
We did a lot of experiments to try and get more people to look at the new page or new content. One was placing one new item at the top of your home page and changing that every couple of minutes. The other was the "rising" sort, which was similar to the hot sort on the front page, but much higher velocity.
None of them really worked all that well. The group of people who read new are a unique breed. :)
Anyway, back to the original question: I don't normally follow newest regularly but if I'm on a long flight or something I might get bored and poke around there is anything else there. Often there is something good which never bubbles up.
Is that what "best" sort is doing when browsing a specific subreddit? Occasionally I'll notice some crappy 1 minute old post on my feed that's out of place and realize the sorting was reset to "best" instead of "hot" instead
https://web.archive.org/web/20091210094533/http://blog.reddi...
It was actually created by the XKCD team, to be better than hot.
However, they may have changed how it works since then.
I’ve found some interesting sites from new before they were popular and started subscribing to them. This is the selfish benefit that keeps me going. It also feels good to be the first upvote on something that ends up hitting the front page.
It's probably because I have always looked at HN as a sort of amusement or curiosity. The curated listing is part of the entertainment. Not because it usually resonates for me, but because it gives me this glimpse into Otherness. The comments can be more resonant, once in a while.
It's a bit like wandering through the bar district and finding your old haunts missing and replaced with weird facades and fashions. But here and there, you notice some patrons are interjecting with stories eerily similar to the one on the tip of your tongue...
It doesn’t work.
I think it took me between one and two weeks to realize I wasn’t actually clicking the front page.
Not the smartest sheep.
To be clear, I'm not reading tons of submissions. I just don't like the idea of only being presented with the top N submissions by vote count. I'd rather scroll a feed that auto-marks each one as read until I see something interesting.
I have the same problem with YouTube. I (almost) only consume entire channels via RSS feeds (sans shorts). I never see the home page, and I only occasionally click an algorithmic recommendation.
I feel that new is wasted on me because I'm not confident that my own thoughts on what's interesting and worth front page promotion is well... interesting to the community.
The idea is that with a fixed page size a new submission would get evicted off the first page quicker and would hence suffer a shorter exposure. One way to counteract that is to increase the aperture.
This of course assumes that people would scroll to the bottom and would do that more often than navigating to the next page.
From one that only ever opens the main page.
Blog post fully written by AI? Sloppy repo cooked up in a weekend just for the shows? Content ripped and repackaged from another site? Irrelevant content? Notification and content removal, three strikes and the account is banned.
That and maybe a reputation system, like 100 points to be able to start submitting requests, I think it has a high chance to make dang's life easier.
I'm a little confused by there being multiple people in the comments who are confused by this. They're basically the same word, and even if they weren't, you only have to look at the URL bar to see "newest". I know it's an unimportant phenomenon for me to be commenting on, but it strikes me as unusual.
I've seen comments where people haven't noticed for years that the site has a footer with links as well. The mods added thread folding and people just never even bothered to try clicking the new link to see what it did, so they never realized that was possible and kept asking for the feature. All of this "hidden" functionality is literally just a link or two away, but it might as well be buried under desert sand as far as this community is concerned.
Edit: Neat. Thanks, all.
Even when someone unlocks flagging they often don't know you can flag comments instead of just downvote them because you have to load the direct link (most easily, the timestamp link) to see it.
I actually don't remember how you're supposed to know about https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc. I'm pretty sure it's not linked on the main page and the input box doesn't make mention of it.
There are some lists out there (probably easiest to just ask AI or check the lists page) of special URLs like /bestcomments or /classic. There are also some query paramters available for certain URLs. Keep in mind the lists page is not exhaustive, e.g. /over
Many never poke around their settings enough to understand showdead or noprocrast exist/how they work.
I bet a good number learned that polls were a thing from this post :D.
That's what comes to mind but it can be hard to remember some of the things because you get ao used to them being there personally (I'm continually surprised users often reach the karma threshold for downvoting before understanding they can flag/vouch comments). I'm sure others can fill in some good ones :).
It's in the FAQ, linked at the bottom of (almost) every page along with the guidelines.
I then use https://oj-hn.com to do all my navigation via keyboard.
So my answer is ‘never’ but I’m working on it. I keep showdead turned on.
Edit - I have been making a big mistake here for a long time. Newest is a heck of a good page and I need to make visiting it into a habit. Thanks for posting this poll; I wouldn’t have remembered that I forgot about a feature without this.
I still comment on main threads out of habit but im probably 10% as active as a decade ago once a top comment gets locked into a thread nothing else matters and there’s no discussion around the edges
All the “AI” debates are played out and boring with basically anyone still excited about anything related to AI treated poorly by people who have basically no expertise in it but mad capitalist automation came for their job