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Poll: How do you consume HN?

news.ycombinator.com

11–20 of 35 posts

Re: Poll: How do you consume HN?

#11

Wow. A sobering reminder to me that even for a tech-savvy readership, only about ten percent are using RSS. Maybe this warrants another survey on why people don't use RSS.

I use RSS a lot but I wouldn't use it for HN. You miss out on the ordering of stories on the frontpage and the browsing of comments.

Re: Poll: How do you consume HN?

#12
post #4

Isn't this poll going to be extremely biased towards people reading it on the main site, since that's the only place you can comment? :)

Indeed. A poll doesn't say much if anything at all if one does not account for self-selection bias.

Today I'm reading the main site, normally I would be reading a daily/weekly/monthly digest. Today I'm commenting, any other day I probably wouldn't. I'm still the same person.

Re: Poll: How do you consume HN?

#13
Shameless plug: I'm still using the realtime UI I showed here a few weeks ago (http://hackerstream.com, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2301871)

People sometimes think it's only useful if you're consuming HN all the time, but it turns out it's just another random slice of HN, one that's guaranteed to be all new no matter how often you check.

Re: Poll: How do you consume HN?

#14

Wow. A sobering reminder to me that even for a tech-savvy readership, only about ten percent are using RSS. Maybe this warrants another survey on why people don't use RSS.

I use RSS a lot but I wouldn't use it for HN. You miss out on the ordering of stories on the frontpage and the browsing of comments.

What's significant or interesting about the ordering of stories on the frontpage?

I still have a link to comments for each story in Google Reader (although I don't get the number of comments). What I gain with Reader is the ability to mark all as read and therefore the ability to see what's new since the last time I checked.

Re: Poll: How do you consume HN?

#16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use RSS a lot but I wouldn't use it for HN. You miss out on the ordering of stories on the frontpage and the browsing of comments.

What's significant or interesting about the ordering of stories on the frontpage? I still have a link to comments for each story in Google Reader (although I don't get the number of comments). What I gain with Reader is the ability to mark all as read and therefore the ability to see what's new since the last time I checked.

The ordering on the Front Page takes into account the age and the upvotes. "Good" stories that have been noticed end up on the Front Page. "Bad" stories, and stories that don't get noticed for random reasons, don't.

Re: Poll: How do you consume HN?

#17

Wow. A sobering reminder to me that even for a tech-savvy readership, only about ten percent are using RSS. Maybe this warrants another survey on why people don't use RSS.

I've noticed that not all posts show up in my RSS reader, I guess it's because of the large number of posts vs the pickup schedule on google reader.

Re: Poll: How do you consume HN?

#19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use RSS a lot but I wouldn't use it for HN. You miss out on the ordering of stories on the frontpage and the browsing of comments.

What's significant or interesting about the ordering of stories on the frontpage? I still have a link to comments for each story in Google Reader (although I don't get the number of comments). What I gain with Reader is the ability to mark all as read and therefore the ability to see what's new since the last time I checked.

If there was no significance to the frontpage it wouldn't exist. It's doing curating for you, a hint at what stories to look at, and all without becoming yet another ever-growing set of things to catch up on if you don't return for a few days.

"I still have a link to comments for each story in Google Reader (although I don't get the number of comments)"

If you browse comments a lot you end up spending almost all your time outside the reader anyway, so it doesn't seem to help that much. I can see how you want to avoid the frontpage if you check HN often - it just shows you the same stories all the time.

I've thought a lot about this, and RSS doesn't really fit social news, especially comments. So far the best UI I've been able to come up with is hackerstream like I said elsewhere in this thread.

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