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Most-favorited Hacker News posts

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Re: Most-favorited Hacker News posts

#211

Post by tlarkworthy »

kohtatsu wrote: post #209
tlarkworthy wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'd actually assume one favourite to be a misclick.

But those would be randomly distributed so it would not affect the top ranks much.

Re: Most-favorited Hacker News posts

#212

Post by FillardMillmore »

tlarkworthy wrote: post #186
dang wrote: post #178

The 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…

> sidenote: Lol this post is the 20th most favorited article now.

Would that make this post a meta-favorite?

Re: Most-favorited Hacker News posts

#214

Post by FillardMillmore »

I quite like the favorite feature. I did not know until reading this post though that you could favorite comments as well - I'll be sure to utilize that in the future.

Others have mentioned that the favorite feature is of little utility because they are using other bookmarking software (browser/browser extensions, etc.). I would say, personally, that I still love the favorite feature on HN because my typical collection of bookmarks contains a whole variety of things - history, politics, music, self-help stuff, etc. The stuff I read and favorite on HN are of an entirely different set of information and curiosity and thus, I really do find it useful to have them all collected in one convenient location.

Re: Most-favorited Hacker News posts

#215

Post by tezzer »

kamilszybalski wrote: post #201
dang wrote: post #178

The 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 think it's interesting at how many of these are "Ask HN" type posts. It could be that people are often seeking to gather specific crowd-sourced knowledge from experts, what happened to Quora?

I got rid of mine when they started paying people to ask questions, and the quality of questions plummeted. Also, the clearly fake "so-and-so would like you to answer a question" email notifications annoyed me.

Re: Most-favorited Hacker News posts

#216

Post by krapp »

dang wrote: post #183
krapp wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

>Yikes, what a horror: either no new features, or complexity increases forever. Fortunately we don't live in that prison.

And fortunately, I didn't suggest that we do, or that features should never be removed... rather that removing a feature that people use because not enough of them use it doesn't make sense for a site like this.

If you want more people to use new features, I think you need to put more effort than you do into making those features more visible. Feature discovery is a problem - there's plenty of anecdotal evidence here to attest to that.

I can think of a couple of possible solutions, such as having new features be bold for a while after being first introduced, so they're more easily noticed, or pinning a thread announcing new site features, or having something like a devlog listing possible and new changes and comments related to development, to better engage the community in the process (or at least raise their awareness that the site is still being actively worked on,) etc. Or all of those.

Re: Most-favorited Hacker News posts

#217

Post by toomuchtodo »

dang wrote: post #192
toomuchtodo wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's on my list to change. It'll work like voting does.

It's appreciated.

Re: Most-favorited Hacker News posts

#218

Post by giancarlostoro »

TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #204
giancarlostoro wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing I wish were possible is to search through upvoted content and favorited content by title and even comments in either. I have upvoted so much stuff a lot of it becomes harder to find if I cant narrow it down by what is relevant to me. Its the one killer feature HN is missing for me. Outside of that one thing I think HN is perfect thus far. Mostly the favorites feature is used by me when I cant upvote somethi…

Oh, sorry, I didn't read / comprehend your comment properly earlier. Firstly, try contacting hn@ycombinator.com detailing what you'd like to build and see if they're interested / able to collaborate or provide you the necessary access / APIs. I'm not a programmer by any stretch of the imagination, but have contacted the mods from time to time and found them eminently approachable. Secondly, if you can't see the up or…

No worries! I was just clarifying, I know sometimes I don't express myself as transparently as I'd hope. I might have to follow up on that suggestion, I didn't even think about that, I've wanted this feature for so long!

Re: Most-favorited Hacker News posts

#219

Post by redisman »

geerlingguy wrote: post #127

I... 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!

Everyone favorite this post so we'll get an infinite loop.

Re: Most-favorited Hacker News posts

#220

Post by mmsimanga »

echelon wrote: post #115
oefrha wrote: post #88

Earlier 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"…

Save is a better name. OP has updated list of favourite stories and many of the Ask HN posts make the list because they often yield a lot of useful information in the comments. I use SQL on a daily basis so most of my favourites are SQL stories. I use favourite to bookmark post and comments.
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