I don’t fav any posts that I like, but upvote them. I also up upvote the ones I want to bookmark, so that I can later come back to read more comments. I don’t really understand why I would need to fav a post.
Most-favorited Hacker News posts
181–190 of 270 posts
Re: Most-favorited Hacker News posts
#182The OP says " The most favorited articles by the top 10k most active Hacker News members. " How was "most active" defined? (Edit: oh I see - the users who post the most comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24352688 ). It's an interesting list, and it never occurred to me that by counting the top favorites of different subsets of users you might get quite different interesting lists. I got curious about what…
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Re: Most-favorited Hacker News posts
#183Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Yikes, what a horror: either no new features, or complexity increases forever. Fortunately we don't live in that prison. And what a dystopian reason you give for removing things!
The humane reason, of course, for removing features, is so you can add new ones while staying simple. I have always found this to be a deep part of, let's call it, healthy software development, at every level. If you remove things as well as add them—code, features, complexity–then the system can breathe over time. When I say "the system" I include the programmers and the community as well as the code—the whole thing. If you're only allowed to add, that's no longer a creative process, just agglutination.
Re: Most-favorited Hacker News posts
#184The 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…
I didn't know about the favorite feature until this post. I may end up using it now.
Re: Most-favorited Hacker News posts
#185clicks favourite
Maybe if the favouriteness could be transitive in some way? It could be called “favouriterank” and we could use it to index the web and surface the best pages when people search for things they are interested in?
Re: Most-favorited Hacker News posts
#186The OP says " The most favorited articles by the top 10k most active Hacker News members. " How was "most active" defined? (Edit: oh I see - the users who post the most comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24352688 ). It's an interesting list, and it never occurred to me that by counting the top favorites of different subsets of users you might get quite different interesting lists. I got curious about what…
I did normalize by number of favorites too, so each person had 1 vote shared over all their favorites. The idea that a person who only had one favourite was a really strong signal for that single link, whereas people who have lots of favorites are using it differently to what I want to select for.
At some point I had a similar selection of Ask HN dominance. One problem with my data is I only grabbed the first page of favorite results.
EDIT: SHOOT, you exposed a bug, my parser skips things things without URLs! Hence I ended up filtering out most of the Ask HN's!
EDIT: Fixed it
Now my list looks a bit more similar to yours but not quite. Currently "Ask HN: What books changed the way you think about almost everything?", your #1 is my #50. If I turn off normalization, it goes to #13 on my lists, so that has quite a significant impact on the rankings.
sidenote: Lol this post is the 20th most favorited article now.
Re: Most-favorited Hacker News posts
#187Honestly, 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.
Besides being tied to your account, the only plus I see of HN bookmarks over browser bookmarks is that your HN bookmarks are shared with the public. Some people may want to keep their favorites private, though.
Re: Most-favorited Hacker News posts
#188Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, click the timestamp on the comment and you'll see the full range of actions.
Yes, click the timestamp on the comment and you'll see the full range of actions. Very interesting, after the very active recent discussion about discoverability in user interfaces. It's like HN hired someone from the iOS design team to come up with the notion of "timestamp" = "favorite."
If it were iOS design, the favorite button would only appear when you rotated your device.
Re: Most-favorited Hacker News posts
#189The list will be inherently biased for recency (note that “Ursula LeGuin has died” is high on the list) simply because there are more people around to vote. Doesn’t make the list meaningless, but it may not surface the “best” articles that might interest you .
I posted the global list here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24355617
Re: Most-favorited Hacker News posts
#190Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
Favorite is one of my most used features. Please don't remove it, dang! :( I frequently go back to these stories, whereas I don't often care to find things I upvoted again. If the two features become conflated, I'll probably stop upvoting so that I can use upvoted stories and posts as a bookmarking system. Please keep favorite stories and posts around. If you're worried about feature utilization, maybe name it "save"…
Favourite is great. I use it sparingly for obvious reasons - I only want truly important items in my favourites list.