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.
95 comments
If you're wondering what those /* urls mean and what else is there: https://news.ycombinator.com/lists
Thanks for this. The classic[0] "Frontpage as voted by ancient accounts" list has me intrigued.
My HN reader supports all those /* urls. (Plus chronological order from HckrNews!)
I like /active personally which will show controversial topics.
Nice I didn’t know even know about that one, it doesn’t show up in the top bar for me
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.
If you want to see everything and pick and choose what's interesting use RSS to get everything - https://news.ycombinator.com/rss
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.
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:
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.
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.
I really like https://news.ycombinator.com/best?h=24 with the GET parameter for hours.
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).
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?
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.
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.
Maybe this could be an option to enable in profile settings?
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.
It does. That's why if you look at any given point there's random posts on there with like 5 votes mixed in.
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.
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.
There are indeed many ways of consuming HN/news. Here are just few ways I've collected recently:
- https://refactoringenglish.com/tools/hn-popularity/
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.
I do visit pretty often along with https://news.ycombinator.com/pool
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 :)
This is the default view I use. But I'm kind of an OG HN user myself.
I did that and see karpathy has a bearblog https://karpathy.bearblog.dev/ wow
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...
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.
"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.
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.
Did Gemini not tell you about the showdead feature in your profile?
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.
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.
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.
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.
There is dark most mode browser add-on. To Firefox.at least
For me, the better HN is https://hckrnews.com/
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".
Yes, the same, it's my de-facto HN homepage for years now. The chronological feed is much more convenient.
I like the more curated homepage, it sorts out of a lot of the promotions for people seeking VC.
/active is FAR better.
> '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?
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.
I've been wondering, why isn't /active in the top nav bar?
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.
HN is tries (and mostly succeeds) to discourage controversial topics.
Does it? The rules seem to suggest that the intent is to discourage arguments and grandstanding in favor of discussions, and many controversial topics and posts tend to end up as shouting matches in the comments.
Religious wars like emacs vs vim are common, so that kind of controversy shows up, but for example anything related to Elon tends to get insta buried.
Basically the topics you might see in mainstream news are usually out.
> Basically the topics you might see in mainstream news are usually out.
Well yea, that’s officially part of the guidelines: “ Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.”
I meant before the DOGE stuff: the technical discussions on his claims about Tesla’s future capabilities, purchase of twitter and latter management, etc.
I am generally very happy with HN’s moderation, but I do feel some borderline topics that have been banned or buried missed interesting discussion. I don’t fault those responsible for not wanting to deal with the potential mess though.
It’s a shame. I distinctly remember a DOGE topic about assertions Musk was making that were easily explained by COBOL oddities. There was a great discussion about it here with knowledgable folks chiming in. And then it got flagged into oblivion. Mainstream news covered it but without any of the knowledge HN users had.
I tend to flag submissions about these kinds of political topics because it becomes clear in context that they're being submitted primarily to provide space for complaining about a political outgroup. This never leads anywhere productive. Best case, everyone agrees and they just stew about how awful the world supposedly is. Common case, people are forced to confront the fact that other people have different values, cultural assumptions etc. and can reasonably come to wildly different conclusions, even starting from the same evidence, because a lot of this is nowhere near as objective a matter as it appears. Worst case, the disagreeing people in the hated outgroup also feel that their position has been grossly misrepresented in the submission.
I could name 10 widely held societal opinions that would instantly get flagged and likely your account banned if you mention a few times. Very hive mind place here
Can you cite any evidence of anybody being banned for the societal opinions they’ve expressed here?
HN wants polite discussion which lends itself well to science and technology topics. Get farther away into history or politics where opinion comes in, then it becomes impossible to debate because arguments that disagree with the hive mind (upper middle class, intelligent, center-left technology professionals) get downvoted and flagged because of popularity.
This just isn’t a site for arguing politics, if you do it too much with opinions different from the hive mind you get banned for disruptive behavior
Did you mean to post this as a reply elsewhere? You made the claim that people are banned for certain opinions and I asked for more information on that.
I’m not going to cite evidence, the evidence is my lived experience posting controversial opinions here for years. Try it yourself and see!
Except… you aren’t banned?
You will get banned if you speak too controversially, but the bigger issue is you get downvoted for wrong-think, but that’s the nature of HN and probably why it has survived so long
Can you cite any example of anyone being banned ever for voicing a controversial opinion?
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
you'd have to do additional analysis to find which accounts stopped posting after the linked warnings though. It's not usually the opinion itself that's the problem, but that users with controversial opinions have other things going on, so the controversial opinion is often delivered in a “wake up sheeple” flamebait persecution complex “in smart and everyone here is an idiot” style, which isn’t conducive to constructive debate.
The evidence there seems to make my point? Those people aren’t being warned for the content of their opinions, they’re being warned not to engage in flamewars or insults or other forms of incivility.
My claim isn’t “nobody gets banned from HN”, it’s “nobody gets banned from HN for having unpopular opinions”.
The parallel comment has very nearly invoked Godwin’s law, so I guess I’ll concede that if your opinion is “a group of people should be killed”, then yea, expressing that opinion would likely end in a ban. We can debate how much of that ban is for the opinion vs calling for the murder of other humans.
HN has at least several almost occasionally "active" shadowbanned accounts that like to literally call for jews to be gassed.
I'd call that controversial.
If you don't have showdead on, you should.
These guys are never able to cite examples. Every time the conversation comes up, they fly in with a vague innuendo, "oh, you know those topics--I'm not going to say it!" plus a "trust me bro" and then fly off without actually getting specific.
What opinions do you want to share that are going to get you banned here?
Which controversial topic do you want to hear my hot take on?
My bet is that what gets people banned is repeatedly being disrespectful or rude, not the opinions they’re disrespectful or rude about.
We have a great example via the flagged reply in this comment tree, where somebody is complaining about being silenced and their example is full of rambling invective yelling at the moderator.
I'm just curious what opinions you hold that will get you banned for typing them out.
Indeed, /active, https://hn.algolia.com/ and similar are good to see submissions unfairly flagged off the main page by dishonest groups.
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)?
Are you aware that people who are part of Ycombinator, as in "founders", have special HN accounts, and are able to see who else has a financial incentive to hype up startups and YC and insist there is nothing wrong with them funding multiple companies that literally plagiarize each other or just slap a logo on top of VSCode hooked up to ChatGPT, or other people that are literally personal friends and collaborators with Elon?
What else do you call such a secret in group who all have aligned financial interests and are externally anonymous?
YC sells this feature as an advantage of being funded by YC.
That's not what I asked. I asked:
> There are known groups that coordinate to flag things on HN?
Your response is unrelated to my question.
s/dishonest groups/other points of view/
Personally I’m capable of disagreeing with someone’s point of view with voting to silence them and hide their view from others. Sunlight, disinfectant and all that.
No, I mean dishonest. When people gang up to push each other's blogs/startups/whatever, it's dishonest. When political groups organize to mass upvote/flag, it's dishonest. They are purposefully sabotaging the wider community for their niche interests. They are cheaters. And IME, more often than not, they are immoral and/or anti-social.
> Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.
I've always found it pretty convenient that discussing rule breaking (astroturfing, shilling, brigading) is itself against the rules.
It makes sense if you remember that Dang doesn't make the rules, and isn't in charge of the rules, and is hired to enforce the rules by YC who does control those rules. Discussing the rules is "noise" in that framing because it can never actually change the rules.
The part that I've always disliked is how Dang always just says "oh trust me, none of that happens here" as if that is a normal thing to insist, don't question the legitimacy of our system.
But it's not like I am ever going to get access to the kind of data to actually verify that claim. I don't exactly expect PG to give a random person like me DB access. I can't fault Dang for not wanting to give out tons of info either, as that aint their job.
HN gets millions of hits per day and is variously treated by outsiders as a special place of experts (it isn't), or internally by middle manager types who insist they are special while being unable to read at a high school level and are disconnected from reality but are still inexplicably in charge of decisions that affect the rest of us.
Are we really supposed to believe this place has never been attacked? Never been successfully attacked?
Your state's biggest newspaper comment section is rife with influence campaigns...
This is dishonest and incorrect. Discussing rulebreaking is not against the guidelines, which is clear to anyone who reads them (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). Accusations of those specific offenses (astroturfing, shilling, brigading) are against the rules, for reasons that are obvious to anyone who thinks about them for a few minutes.
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.
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?
when would i be able to submit?
fact is, this one made its way from /newest to "/".
And yet, indeed, it is up to us to weigh in for better content.
hckrnews.com is my go to and has been for years
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