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Most-favorited Hacker News posts

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Re: Most-favorited Hacker News posts

#251

Post by comboy »

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…

> The idea that a person who only had one favourite was a really strong signal for that single link

Perhaps karma or account age should join the equation.

Re: Most-favorited Hacker News posts

#252

Post by losvedir »

dang wrote: post #235
surround wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about most favorited comments?

140 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4247615 138 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15603013 108 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18442941 93 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13436420 86 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8902739 81 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11042400 81 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14948078 76 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6199544 65 https://news.ycombinator.…

Ha, I see three of those are already gray-visited for me, and clicking them now, I see why!

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18442941 was a great look at Oracle DB development

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35079 was one of the most hilarious situations of all time on HN

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 was a fun early Dropbox "No wireless, less space than a Nomad, lame" moment.

I'm gonna have to check out some of these others that I haven't seen before! Great list, thanks!

Re: Most-favorited Hacker News posts

#253

Post by clusmore »

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…

> 425 24351073 Most favorited Hacker News posts of all time

Interesting that a post about most favorited Hacker News posts is itself one of the most favorited Hacker News posts.

Re: Most-favorited Hacker News posts

#254

Post by tlarkworthy »

jellevdv wrote: post #159
tlarkworthy wrote: post #50

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…

What does Angolia have to do with HN? Edit: found it, it's Algolia. Thought s/he was talking about Angola.

I have never managed to query by its name ever. I default to googling for hn search when I look for it.

Re: Most-favorited Hacker News posts

#255

Post by tlarkworthy »

codethief wrote: post #102
amai wrote: post #66

I think this list is more useful: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

Thanks for the link! I've been looking for such a feature that shows me the most popular posts within a given timeframe. My thought process was that, as much as I enjoy discussions on HN, I don't want to spend too much time on it and, in particular, I want to avoid browsing HN out of FOMO multiple times a day. Instead I'd rather just schedule half an hour to an hour every week to have a look at the most popular posts…

There is a best link https://news.ycombinator.com/best

Re: Most-favorited Hacker News posts

#257

Post by danso »

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.

That's funny, I always thought it was intentional. Because the slight inconvenience of the favoriting action definitely makes me more selective in using it.

I suppose the public nature of the favorites list (as opposed to upvoted list) will still have that self-filtering effect.

Re: Most-favorited Hacker News posts

#258

Post by dang »

danso wrote: post #257
dang wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That's funny, I always thought it was intentional. Because the slight inconvenience of the favoriting action definitely makes me more selective in using it. I suppose the public nature of the favorites list (as opposed to upvoted list) will still have that self-filtering effect.

It was intentional, but the intention was feature discovery. We did it that way in the hope that people would get to know the favorites page and start browsing the favorites of others. It doesn't seem to have had that effect; it's just a pain. I suppose we could put up a confirmation screen first: "Do you want to add 'foo' to your favorites?" But that might just be a pain too.

There's another discovery issue, which is that not everyone knows that favorites are public. Publicness was the primary reason we built the feature: the hope that it would be a new way of finding interesting stories. One can see that happening in this thread to some extent. Overall, though, I was disappointed that it didn't have more of this effect, which is why I considered removing it.

Perhaps we just didn't do enough to promote it. Someone suggested having a quarterly post about the most-favorited stories. That might be a good way. We could have different most-favorited lists based on different subsets of users. We could ask people which accounts have the most interesting favorites. and so on.

Re: Most-favorited Hacker News posts

#259

Post by dang »

tlarkworthy wrote: post #247
dang wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

140 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4247615 138 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15603013 108 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18442941 93 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13436420 86 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8902739 81 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11042400 81 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14948078 76 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6199544 65 https://news.ycombinator.…

Top comments dont work so well as there is no curated titles. The content is good but may not be relevant to the reader

I think a prefix of the comment string is in most cases sufficient to disclose what the comment is about. I tried to include that above, but it got too tricky for silly technical reasons so I bailed.

Re: Most-favorited Hacker News posts

#260

Post by dang »

clusmore wrote: post #253
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…

> 425 24351073 Most favorited Hacker News posts of all time Interesting that a post about most favorited Hacker News posts is itself one of the most favorited Hacker News posts.

I totally missed that yesterday.
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