I do not have showdead on, but I visit newest most times I visit HN. I'm more likely to browse the headlines/comments on the front page but click on links on newest.
Poll: How often do you check "newest"?
41–50 of 120 posts
Re: Poll: How often do you check "newest"?
#42I 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…
Those missing stories are nearly all Reddit-style political flamewars which is not what this site is for, so don't think finding something on active is some massive W.
Re: Poll: How often do you check "newest"?
#43I consume the RSS firehose exclusively, so I guess the answer is "constantly". I have no idea which submissions are highly voted.
I tried this and it was unbearable.
Re: Poll: How often do you check "newest"?
#44Often the frontpage will include a new submission with few votes at the top, I recall others in other threads speculating that this is an intentional way (rather than an edge case in the ranking algo) of getting new posts evaluated without people having to visit /newest
Re: Poll: How often do you check "newest"?
#45Reddit 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 "rising" sort, which was similar to the hot sort on the front page, but much higher velocity.
None of them really worked all that well. The group of people who read new are a unique breed. :)
Re: Poll: How often do you check "newest"?
#46I consume the RSS firehose exclusively, so I guess the answer is "constantly". I have no idea which submissions are highly voted.
I tried this and it was unbearable.
Yeah, I'm certainly in the minority. I have an "all or nothing" brain problem.
To be clear, I'm not reading tons of submissions. I just don't like the idea of only being presented with the top N submissions by vote count. I'd rather scroll a feed that auto-marks each one as read until I see something interesting.
I have the same problem with YouTube. I (almost) only consume entire channels via RSS feeds (sans shorts). I never see the home page, and I only occasionally click an algorithmic recommendation.
Re: Poll: How often do you check "newest"?
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
Downvoting/flagging kind of just "appear" for most before they get a chance to read about it being a thing. Even when someone unlocks flagging they often don't know you can flag comments instead of just downvote them because you have to load the direct link (most easily, the timestamp link) to see it. I actually don't remember how you're supposed to know about https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc . I'm pretty sure…
> I actually don't remember how you're supposed to know about https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc . I'm pretty sure it's not linked on the main page and the input box doesn't make mention of it. It's in the FAQ, linked at the bottom of (almost) every page along with the guidelines.
Thanks for the reminder! I knew I found it somewhere other than Google once!
Re: Poll: How often do you check "newest"?
#48Took me a while to learn that the link above `new` points to `/newest`.
Re: Poll: How often do you check "newest"?
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
I tried this and it was unbearable.
Yeah, I'm certainly in the minority. I have an "all or nothing" brain problem. To be clear, I'm not reading tons of submissions. I just don't like the idea of only being presented with the top N submissions by vote count. I'd rather scroll a feed that auto-marks each one as read until I see something interesting. I have the same problem with YouTube. I (almost) only consume entire channels via RSS feeds (sans shorts)…
I do the same (both here and YT). I stay away from algorithmic anything. If something is too high volume to avoid it, I'd rather avoid that something.
Re: Poll: How often do you check "newest"?
#50I consume the RSS firehose exclusively, so I guess the answer is "constantly". I have no idea which submissions are highly voted.
I do the same thing, I never really noticed what submissions are high rank or not, I just come for my own interests.