Live data from Hacker News

Most-favorited Hacker News posts

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131–140 of 270 posts

Re: Most-favorited Hacker News posts

#131
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You may use it intensively, but as far as I can tell, you have only 27 favorites at the moment ( https://news.ycombinator.com/favorites?id=weinzierl ) I guess there also are a lot more stories (over 24 million, it seems) than regular users. Even taking your 27 as the average per user, I would expect the average number of time an article gets favored to be significantly below 1.

Indeed I do have hundreds of favorites, going back till 2012. What you are looking at are just my favorited stories, but I have a lot more favorite comments. Funnily your comment kind of supports my point that the UX could be improved;-) Also a disclaimer for those looking at my favorites: I use this feature much like a bookmarking service and for me a favorite means an endorsement only in the sense that I found the…

Aha! Thanks. The UI can be improved, yes.

Re: Most-favorited Hacker News posts

#132
post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Removing features to decrease maintenance overhead is also a pretty legit reason, and you don't have to be a corporate site for that to apply to you (I would say it applies even more to a hobby site). That said, I really hope favorites isn't removed because even though I only discovered the feature a few years ago, I really cherish the comments I've favorited.

"decreasing maintenance overhead" could apply equally to every feature on the site, though. How often do people use polls?

there are polls?

Re: Most-favorited Hacker News posts

#133
post #123
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.

Why would I use this instead of my browser's bookmarks, which have tags, folders, and search, and are less likely to be discontinued by the product storing them?

For me, the answer is that my browser bookmarks are tied to a physical machine and specific browser. I use many machines, and sometimes many different browsers on each.

Re: Most-favorited Hacker News posts

#134

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…

Hidden? They're in plain sight at the top of every article page.

Those are not mutually exclusive facts. You're zero words away from the phrase "hidden in plain sight".

Re: Most-favorited Hacker News posts

#136
post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"decreasing maintenance overhead" could apply equally to every feature on the site, though. How often do people use polls?

there are polls?

> there are polls?

...Exactly. It's been a feature forever, it complicates the codebase, and no one ever uses it.

Two examples[0,1].

[0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7033047

[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2445039

Re: Most-favorited Hacker News posts

#137
post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"decreasing maintenance overhead" could apply equally to every feature on the site, though. How often do people use polls?

there are polls?

https://news.ycombinator.com/newpoll

Hardly ever see it used in any capacity though.

Re gp: removing buttons shown on every page is probably more about simplifying interface and reclaiming space than maintenance overhead.

Re: Most-favorited Hacker News posts

#138
post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Thank You. I wasn't aware of that section.

Re: Most-favorited Hacker News posts

#139
When I saw “favorited” I thought that was referring to what I guess is “upvoted” - as others have mentioned, I didn’t even realize that was a feature. Is there a list of most upvoted HN stories of all time?
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