Tell HN: Want a better HN? Visit /newest

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46079745

by alecco • 8 months ago

299 85 8 months ago

news.ycombinator.com

Most good posts die in /newest, buried under low-quality submissions.

HN depends on people visiting /newest and upvoting or flagging what they see.

A few minutes there each day probably does more for HN than commenting.

It’s anonymous, thankless work, like Reddit’s old “Knights of New,” but it makes a difference.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newest

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

qq99• 8 months ago

For me, the better HN is https://hckrnews.com/

hiq• 8 months ago

That's my main way to find interesting links, especially as I usually find comments more interesting than the featured links. I default to the "top 20".

Yizahi• 8 months ago

Yes, the same, it's my de-facto HN homepage for years now. The chronological feed is much more convenient.

tyleo• 8 months ago

I like /active personally which will show controversial topics.

https://news.ycombinator.com/active

an0malous• 8 months ago

Nice I didn’t know even know about that one, it doesn’t show up in the top bar for me

ASalazarMX• 8 months ago

I think a list of active topics where the overall comment's upvote/downvote ratio is high, would help to avoid political, ideological, and rage posts; for those times where you just want to browse fun topics like labyrinth algorithms.

Despite that, /active is not that bad for that.

Brajeshwar• 8 months ago

I do visit pretty often along with https://news.ycombinator.com/pool

pmontra• 8 months ago

No so thankless: there are many interesting links that never make it to the front page and the only way to find them is browse the first two or three pages of New. It's self rewarding.

mixmastamyk• 8 months ago

Indeed, a few friends have been submitting an important piece on a new open/FOSS platform, but have been unable to get it noticed. It really needs feedback:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46079803

mittermayr• 8 months ago

If you're wondering what those /* urls mean and what else is there: https://news.ycombinator.com/lists

karmakaze• 8 months ago

Thanks for this. The classic[0] "Frontpage as voted by ancient accounts" list has me intrigued.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/classic

Leftium• 8 months ago

My HN reader supports all those /* urls. (Plus chronological order from HckrNews!)

https://hn.leftium.com/config

afavour3• 8 months ago

I’m grateful for those who do visit /newest because it’s a cesspit of spam and uninteresting links that, justifiably, never make their way to the home page.

/active, on the other hand, is the real insiders tip. It shows the most active submissions, irrespective of whether they’ve been flagged off the homepage by users who want to avoid “controversial” topics or by an algorithm trying to avoid the same.

You don’t want it to replace the homepage as the arguing will drive you mad over time but it’s worth checking in with to see what conversation is being hidden from you.

https://news.ycombinator.com/active

zahlman3• 8 months ago

I've been wondering, why isn't /active in the top nav bar?

tekla• 8 months ago

HN is tries (and mostly succeeds) to discourage controversial topics.

tptacek• 8 months ago

It's been under /lists practically since the site started, when /lists was just a dump of interesting rollups 'pg could think of. There's probably less thought put into its placement than you think.

alecco3• 8 months ago

Indeed, /active, https://hn.algolia.com/ and similar are good to see submissions unfairly flagged off the main page by dishonest groups.

SoftTalker• 8 months ago

s/dishonest groups/other points of view/

throw109203• 8 months ago

There are known groups that coordinate to flag things on HN? That seems extraordinarily silly. If you wanted to do influence ops, there are much more rewarding targets, like Reddit and X. Are you sure that the flagging that you see isn't just people removing articles that violate the guidelines (or lead to comments that violate them)?

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

b2ccb2• 8 months ago

I really like https://news.ycombinator.com/best?h=24 with the GET parameter for hours.

coffeecoders• 8 months ago

If we all rely on others to skim /newest, the whole curation system collapses. Maybe the homepage should surface a couple random fresh posts too?

krapp• 8 months ago

This is what worries me. If too many people read these pages the mods might think it undermines the quality of the community and discourse and just remove them. There is only one acceptable way of using HN, and it's in the service of maximizing civil, intellectually curious technical conversation, and suppressing everything else.

ChrisArchitect2• 8 months ago

It does. That's why if you look at any given point there's random posts on there with like 5 votes mixed in.

alecco3• 8 months ago

I remember this being discussed a while ago and I proposed a box at the bottom with a few pseudo-random /newest links. Bu someone raised issues with the idea.

dang• 8 months ago

We tried that once and it failed, because the median random submission is so much lower-quality than the rest of the frontpage. People reacted much as they would to finding kitchen compost in their breakfast cereal.

andrewflnr2• 8 months ago

I definitely think this is a good idea for a new social platform, though. Probably the key is setting expectations correctly.

I do wonder if a new post quarantine box on the front page, marked as such, would do better than just mixing them in.

tech234a• 8 months ago

Maybe this could be an option to enable in profile settings?

timonoko2• 8 months ago

I asked Gemini to make me HN-reader that show only [flagged]-messages, because when somebody was triggered that much, it must be something interesting.

Found out that they have devious schema to keep those hidden from anonymous visitor. And if you do this on a registered account, they block such perverts right away, said Gemini.

andrewflnr2• 8 months ago

Did Gemini not tell you about the showdead feature in your profile?

timonoko2• 8 months ago

That is not the point.

I wanted only [flagged]-content.

You can get all stuff in JSON-format, but [flagged]-content is elsewhere available only to registered users.

carlosjobim• 8 months ago

If you find a good post on "new" and it doesn't seem to get any traction, then you can e-mail the moderators here and they might put it in their "pool" or "invited" list (forgot which one).

https://news.ycombinator.com/lists

jperras• 8 months ago

There's also /classic, which only counts votes from user accounts created before a certain cutoff date.

The cutoff used to be early 2008, I believe, but that may have changed in the last ~17 years :)

kilroy123• 8 months ago

This is the default view I use. But I'm kind of an OG HN user myself.

dooglius• 8 months ago

I've noticed occasionally a new post will show up in my homepage, which I've interpreted as being a randomized injection of new stuff to see if it gets traction. If that's true (and this is all speculation on my part), it's not strictly necessary for anyone to visit /newest.

ChrisArchitect2• 8 months ago

"most good posts" don't die in newest, otherwise HN wouldn't be functioning/popular. Almost all of the top-top posts (save a few dupes) are fresh, original content that's popular with readers and/or generating lots of discussion. C'mon now. If anything, use /newest to see the actual mire of low-quality submissions and keep them there.

_hao• 8 months ago

If you want to see everything and pick and choose what's interesting use RSS to get everything - https://news.ycombinator.com/rss

znpy• 8 months ago

Better HN?

Everytime i open /newest there's a lot of trash that hasn't been downvoted or flagged to oblivion yet.

Not sure it's that better.

the__alchemist2• 8 months ago

Can you see why viewing "new" might be a good idea for overall site health, with this point in mind? What actions could you take to help with this?

tzury• 8 months ago

fact is, this one made its way from /newest to "/".

And yet, indeed, it is up to us to weigh in for better content.

tmvnty• 8 months ago

There are indeed many ways of consuming HN/news. Here are just few ways I've collected recently:

- https://hckrnews.com/

- https://hcker.news/

- https://hn.unlurker.com/

- https://refactoringenglish.com/tools/hn-popularity/

- https://lessnews.dev/

- https://news.kagi.com/world/latest

- https://forty.news/

- https://news.ysimulator.run/news

kazinator• 8 months ago

There is a link to this: just click on "new" in the banner bar, right next to "Hacker News".

By saying that it feed is better you are saying that the mechanisms which promote stories, and other mechanisms like moderation, make HackerNews worse.

8cvor6j844qw_d6• 8 months ago

I'm looking for a simple dark mode reader/frontend, but similar in the current HN style and adapted for mobile view (adjusted font size) for late night bed scrolling.

No apps however.

npodbielski• 8 months ago

There is dark most mode browser add-on. To Firefox.at least

petermcneeley• 8 months ago

'Most good posts die in /newest, buried under low-quality submissions.'

If the system doesnt work why advocate for it? We are a technical people, dont we have a technical solution?

flakiness• 8 months ago

I kind of enjoy /newest. Yes, the it has more noise, but sometimes you can get random interesting things without filtered by that HN bias. I do like that bias overall, but sometimes fresh unfiltered air is nice thing to have.

labrador• 8 months ago

I second this. Sometimes people post off-the-wall interesting things that don't suit Hacker News. Even the dead and flagged links can sometimes be interesting, although 99% of the time I agree with the dead and flagged status. But that one percent can be good in another context.

kylehotchkiss• 8 months ago

I like the more curated homepage, it sorts out of a lot of the promotions for people seeking VC.

the__alchemist2• 8 months ago

I consider it a duty to periodically check new, sample some articles, and upvote or flag if appropriate. Once a day, once every few days etc; a few articles each time.

Der_Einzige• 8 months ago

/active is FAR better.

redbell• 8 months ago

Totally agree on this although I have to confess that I don't visit /newest frequently, this is a nice reminder!

Fortunately, the HN system has that feature called pool or second chance (https://news.ycombinator.com/pool) where mods periodically check then pick interesting submissions that were overlooked when posted and put them in the second half of the front page and see if the community finds them interesting. This happened to many of my submissions that I was surprised to see trending, sometimes after three days of submission where I totally forgot about them.

whamlastxmas• 8 months ago

hckrnews.com is my go to and has been for years

chfritz• 8 months ago

Let's divide-and-conquer! -- like all good CS algorithms do. /newest is very noisy but if you subscribe to just a "sliver" that you are interested in and review those submissions, then we can improve voting together very effectively. Personally I'm interested in robotics, so I just use this in my RSS reader and literally look at every submission (because it's not too much): https://hnrss.org/newest?q=robot%20OR%20robotics%20OR%20robo...

dcsocialclick• 8 months ago

when would i be able to submit?

zsolt224• 8 months ago

It seems to me that unless you already have some social following and promote your HN submission there it’s impossible to get to the front page. No matter how good your submission is.

I posted (subjectively) high quality stuff about longevity tools that had a potential to be on front page, but the /newest just grows go so fast that no one will notice it.

nrhrjrjrjtntbt• 8 months ago

I did that and see karpathy has a bearblog https://karpathy.bearblog.dev/ wow

ref: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46095250

Tell HN: Want a better HN? Visit /newest

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