I made this for scraping favorites a while back. https://github.com/reactual/hacker-news-favorites-api
Most-favorited Hacker News posts
141–150 of 270 posts
Re: Most-favorited Hacker News posts
#142When 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?
Re: Most-favorited Hacker News posts
#143I... never knew “favorite” was a feature on hacker news until I read this post. Now I see the “favorite” link right above this comment form. I guess I never even noticed the links on the post page are different than when browsing stories on the front page. Now I’m noticing there’s also a “hide” link!
I never knew about the favorite “button” as well. I think the “button” might be more clear if a unicode “heart” was used instead.
Re: Most-favorited Hacker News posts
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 fo…
Hide is important to me too. I don't want to be worked up by the threads that I know will br charged that I'm tempted to click on.
Seconded. I hide threads I know I won’t be able to have a productive conversation in.
Re: Most-favorited Hacker News posts
#145Re: Most-favorited Hacker News posts
#146I've occasionally looked at the favorites of highly active users (e.g. the list of karma leaders), and I've rarely found other users to have used the feature. As for me, I love using it – it has the right amount of friction such that I only end up using it for things that really are my favorite. I never look through my own upvote history. But whenever I need to find something that I remember being great, it's almost…
My only complaint with the favorite feature is that after favoriting, it takes you to your favorites page, versus an async request leaving you in place with the comment or post favorited.
Re: Most-favorited Hacker News posts
#147I think it's interesting that out of all the news articles about famous people that have died, Ursla le Guin is the one that turns up in this list.
Re: Most-favorited Hacker News posts
#148Honestly, 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.
That's because I already have bookmarks in my browser, marking articles as favorite on HN would give me no value.
I switch computers frequently (desktop, chromebook, laptop, phone, etc.) so having some kind of centralized 'favorites' is nice. I've not used the bookmark sync with Firefox or such.
I've noticed that I rarely go back and look at my favorites though.
Re: Most-favorited Hacker News posts
#149The 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 didn't even know there was a 'hide' option. Just never looked at anything below the title, really! Been here for a while too
Re: Most-favorited Hacker News posts
#150Notice that the 19th most favorited post is also flagged. ("Those People We Tried to Cancel? They’re All Hanging Out Together"). To me, that indicates the flagging mechanism on hn is broken.
Have you actually read that thread? It's a garbage fire.
To me, flagging worked as intended.