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Most-favorited Hacker News posts

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91–100 of 270 posts

Re: Most-favorited Hacker News posts

#91
post #2

Honestly, I’m kind of surprised more people do not use the favorite feature to bookmark interesting links / posts. 96 favorites on the most favorited seems really low.

I have another tool (Pocket) that I use for bookmarking interesting posts for later reading/reference that works independently of which site I happen to be on.

Re: Most-favorited Hacker News posts

#93
post #89
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've used this website since 2010 and just realized it was a feature. Maybe I'm just unobservant...

It's relatively new. Before we used upvotes. Actually I still don't use it and keep using upvotes to favourite stories. I'm sorry for that and even worse: sometimes I upvote a story without following the link, just using the upvote as a "read later" bookmark because I found the title intriguing. Not so bad is when I upvote because there's a very interesting comment, even though the article itself is crappy. Time ago…

Not so bad is when I upvote because there's a very interesting comment

If you didn’t know, you can “favorite” comments, too.

Re: Most-favorited Hacker News posts

#94
post #88

The fact that favorites are a hidden feature and hard to use made me think the quality of the curation signal would be even better. Also the fact the HackerNews API, Angolia don't expose this feature made it even more interesting to aggregate. Hope you like it and as it was a pain gathering the data, I put it in an observable notebook so hopefully we don't need to gather that dataset again for a while. The learning r…

When I emailed mods to argue that the 'web' button should be restored[1], I was told by dang that he was actually considering removing 'hide' and 'favorite' too, because people rarely use those features. (I routinely use 'hide' but hardly ever use 'favorite'.) Btw, 'favorite' may be lesser-known but it's certainly not hard to use. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23762479

I'd personally find removing favorite rather frustrating as it's a nice way of differentiating posts than just upvoting so that I can easily find them again in the future...

Re: Most-favorited Hacker News posts

#95
post #88

The fact that favorites are a hidden feature and hard to use made me think the quality of the curation signal would be even better. Also the fact the HackerNews API, Angolia don't expose this feature made it even more interesting to aggregate. Hope you like it and as it was a pain gathering the data, I put it in an observable notebook so hopefully we don't need to gather that dataset again for a while. The learning r…

When I emailed mods to argue that the 'web' button should be restored[1], I was told by dang that he was actually considering removing 'hide' and 'favorite' too, because people rarely use those features. (I routinely use 'hide' but hardly ever use 'favorite'.) Btw, 'favorite' may be lesser-known but it's certainly not hard to use. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23762479

> was told by dang that he was actually considering removing 'hide' and 'favorite' too, because people rarely use those features.

That's something you do with a corporate site where you're constantly A/B testing and aggressively removing features that don't generate revenue. Hacker News isn't (or shouldn't be) run that way. It's perfectly fine to have features only a few people use.

Re: Most-favorited Hacker News posts

#96
post #2

Honestly, I’m kind of surprised more people do not use the favorite feature to bookmark interesting links / posts. 96 favorites on the most favorited seems really low.

Another hidden feature is 'top links'(https://news.ycombinator.com/best). It is not visible to me (may be because of low karma), but if I directly type it in the url it works.

Re: Most-favorited Hacker News posts

#97
post #88

The fact that favorites are a hidden feature and hard to use made me think the quality of the curation signal would be even better. Also the fact the HackerNews API, Angolia don't expose this feature made it even more interesting to aggregate. Hope you like it and as it was a pain gathering the data, I put it in an observable notebook so hopefully we don't need to gather that dataset again for a while. The learning r…

When I emailed mods to argue that the 'web' button should be restored[1], I was told by dang that he was actually considering removing 'hide' and 'favorite' too, because people rarely use those features. (I routinely use 'hide' but hardly ever use 'favorite'.) Btw, 'favorite' may be lesser-known but it's certainly not hard to use. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23762479

I don’t use favourite often but that’s the point. Favourites are 100% signal

Re: Most-favorited Hacker News posts

#98
post #2

Honestly, I’m kind of surprised more people do not use the favorite feature to bookmark interesting links / posts. 96 favorites on the most favorited seems really low.

Another hidden feature is 'top links'( https://news.ycombinator.com/best ). It is not visible to me (may be because of low karma), but if I directly type it in the url it works.

It's hidden behind "Lists" in the site footer along with some other pages.

Re: Most-favorited Hacker News posts

#99
post #88

The fact that favorites are a hidden feature and hard to use made me think the quality of the curation signal would be even better. Also the fact the HackerNews API, Angolia don't expose this feature made it even more interesting to aggregate. Hope you like it and as it was a pain gathering the data, I put it in an observable notebook so hopefully we don't need to gather that dataset again for a while. The learning r…

When I emailed mods to argue that the 'web' button should be restored[1], I was told by dang that he was actually considering removing 'hide' and 'favorite' too, because people rarely use those features. (I routinely use 'hide' but hardly ever use 'favorite'.) Btw, 'favorite' may be lesser-known but it's certainly not hard to use. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23762479

Removing "hide" is the wrong call. People, especially in work environments, need to be able to hide links for all sorts of reasons. For example, if you work at Apple and there is an inflammatory article or if you've recently lost a family member to suicide and there is an article on a famous figure in the tech community committing suicide like Aaron Swartz, you probably don't want to see that on the homepage of HN for the day. It's one of the best features of Reddit and HN, imo.

Re: Most-favorited Hacker News posts

#100

The fact that favorites are a hidden feature and hard to use made me think the quality of the curation signal would be even better. Also the fact the HackerNews API, Angolia don't expose this feature made it even more interesting to aggregate. Hope you like it and as it was a pain gathering the data, I put it in an observable notebook so hopefully we don't need to gather that dataset again for a while. The learning r…

The "favorites" feature is amazing and just rightly inconspicuous. On my website, https://mihir.ch/#hn, I've been collecting and displaying my favorited posts and comments from an API I created for this purpose only.

The API: https://hn-faves.now.sh

Source: https://github.com/plibither8/hn-faves-api

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