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Most-favorited Hacker News posts

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Re: Most-favorited Hacker News posts

#111

Post by throwaway_pdp09 »

CydeWeys wrote: post #108
throwaway_pdp09 wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've noticed these and that's probably only because I trained myself to look carefully at stuff (that was a lot of work too). Small, light grey font on a beige background, well, what did HN expect.

Yeah, that's a separate but related issue: HN's UI is too low contrast to the point of posing an accessibility issue. It kind of tells you everything you need to know about YCombinator (and maybe SV VC in general) that its biggest watering hole doesn't make even this basic concession towards accessibility.

I agree but HN does work rather well without JS enabled, so credit where credit's due.

Re: Most-favorited Hacker News posts

#112

Post by abnry »

3pt14159 wrote: post #99
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

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.

Re: Most-favorited Hacker News posts

#113

Post by stephenhuey »

oefrha wrote: post #88
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…

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 have hundreds of favorite comments.

Re: Most-favorited Hacker News posts

#114

Post by debaserab2 »

krapp wrote: post #95
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

> 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.

Removing features to decrease maintenance overhead is also a pretty legit reason, and you don't have to be a corporate site for that to apply to you (I would say it applies even more to a hobby site).

That said, I really hope favorites isn't removed because even though I only discovered the feature a few years ago, I really cherish the comments I've favorited.

Re: Most-favorited Hacker News posts

#115

Post by echelon »

oefrha wrote: post #88
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…

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" for better discoverability. That's essentially what I use the feature for.

I don't trust or use browser bookmarks much anymore. HN favorites are high quality bookmarks that work across all my browsers and devices.

Re: Most-favorited Hacker News posts

#116

Post by mindcrime »

narag wrote: post #89
avree wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've used this website since 2010 and just realized it was a feature. Maybe I'm just unobservant...

It's relatively new. Before we used upvotes. Actually I still don't use it and keep using upvotes to favourite stories. I'm sorry for that and even worse: sometimes I upvote a story without following the link, just using the upvote as a "read later" bookmark because I found the title intriguing. Not so bad is when I upvote because there's a very interesting comment, even though the article itself is crappy. Time ago…

Actually I still don't use it and keep using upvotes to favourite stories. I'm sorry for that

So do I, but I'm not going to apologize for it. Upvoting is the fastest and more convenient way to save a story as "read later", so it's what I do. If they would add the "favorite" link to the front-page items, I'd use it instead of upvoting.

Re: Most-favorited Hacker News posts

#117

Post by debaserab2 »

3pt14159 wrote: post #99
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

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 super useful for threads you want to read but have the typical knee-jerk flamebait war responses at the top that turn into massive comment trees that you want to skip.

A lot of times the good stuff is at the bottom.

Re: Most-favorited Hacker News posts

#118

Post by weinzierl »

Someone wrote: post #43
weinzierl wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really surprised anymore because this has been discussed in the past but still perplexed why this is the case. I use the feature intensively and I find it useful. UX could be improved though, especially I'd like to be able to favorite a comment with a single click/tap, very much like voting up or down.

You may use it intensively, but as far as I can tell, you have only 27 favorites at the moment ( https://news.ycombinator.com/favorites?id=weinzierl ) I guess there also are a lot more stories (over 24 million, it seems) than regular users. Even taking your 27 as the average per user, I would expect the average number of time an article gets favored to be significantly below 1.

Indeed I do have hundreds of favorites, going back till 2012. What you are looking at are just my favorited stories, but I have a lot more favorite comments. Funnily your comment kind of supports my point that the UX could be improved;-)

Also a disclaimer for those looking at my favorites: I use this feature much like a bookmarking service and for me a favorite means an endorsement only in the sense that I found the contribution interesting and valuable enough to be remembered. I don't necessarily agree with what is said in the postings I favorite.

Re: Most-favorited Hacker News posts

#119

Post by bbotond »

oefrha wrote: post #88
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…

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 really really hope they don't remove favorite. I have a lot of comments and posts saved and return to read them from time to time.

Re: Most-favorited Hacker News posts

#120

Post by kinleyd »

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"…

Yes, like you I use favourite routinely. Please don't remove it.
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