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Poll: How often do you check "newest"?

news.ycombinator.com

81–90 of 120 posts

Re: Poll: How often do you check "newest"?

#83
post #45

Reddit had a term for people who read the new page -- the knights of new. The small group of people who make the site work by traipsing through the sludge that is the new page, finding the gems within. We did a lot of experiments to try and get more people to look at the new page or new content. One was placing one new item at the top of your home page and changing that every couple of minutes. The other was the "ris…

Looking at New makes for an unfiltered experience, and you accept the nonsense that comes with that, on any platform. At that point it's still unaffected by the hivemind consensus.

Re: Poll: How often do you check "newest"?

#84

I use /active more then /newest because I often am looking for a discussion already happening so I can learn from others. I feel that new is wasted on me because I'm not confident that my own thoughts on what's interesting and worth front page promotion is well... interesting to the community.

Yea, /active is HN's secret, killer app. HN's default ranking algorithm often penalizes stories that "get too much activity" which means that if you aren't one of those guys who refreshes the main page every 5 minutes, you're going to miss a lot of newsworthy articles that happen to get many comments. I'd recommend all HN readers visit /active once at the end of the day to see what The Algorithm hid from the front pa…

/active is like showdead. Use it for five minutes and you'll realize why the guardrails exist in the first place.

Re: Poll: How often do you check "newest"?

#86
post #45

Reddit had a term for people who read the new page -- the knights of new. The small group of people who make the site work by traipsing through the sludge that is the new page, finding the gems within. We did a lot of experiments to try and get more people to look at the new page or new content. One was placing one new item at the top of your home page and changing that every couple of minutes. The other was the "ris…

What percent of the knights of new in 2026 are genuine vs sock puppets designed to seed engagement and get the snowball moving? Probably not a lot, considering most posts on reddit these days seem to come from spam bot accounts that do nothing but post identical links to dozens of subreddits. reddit now allows media accounts to post directly from their own managed accounts, violating the old rules against self promotion.

Re: Poll: How often do you check "newest"?

#89
post #64
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We did a lot of experiments to try and get more people to look at the new page or new content Is that what "best" sort is doing when browsing a specific subreddit? Occasionally I'll notice some crappy 1 minute old post on my feed that's out of place and realize the sorting was reset to "best" instead of "hot" instead

"Best" may include some new posts, I actually haven't checked, but the thing that stands out to me is how old many of the posts are. Ever since Reddit made "best" the default sort on the app I notice that any new subreddit I go to will show me at least some posts from more than two weeks ago. It's really baffling that Reddit seems to think it should be preferred over "hot".

I was going to comment I've never seen this before. Then I went to a subreddit and it hit me that I only use old reddit, which lacks the "best" feature.

I'm not sure why people tolerate the new reddit website. It is so slow, busy, and chock full of ads. When I open it on the phone you are straight up missing a lot of discussion comments, so it is broken too. You click a comment it looks like it has no subcomments under it. You click the permalink opening that comment thread in a new window, and there's still no subcomment under it. Now you prefix old. to the url, now you see the subcomments.

Makes me wonder how much discussion there is that is just not observed at all by a good fraction of the site who browses these same threads. Two universes on the same post.

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