alt Hacker NewsTell HN: Want a better HN? Visit /newest
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.
Comments
If you're wondering what those /* urls mean and what else is there: https://news.ycombinator.com/lists
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 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.
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.
If you want to see everything and pick and choose what's interesting use RSS to get everything - https://news.ycombinator.com/rss
I like /active personally which will show controversial topics.
I really like https://news.ycombinator.com/best?h=24 with the GET parameter for hours.
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?
There are indeed many ways of consuming HN/news. Here are just few ways I've collected recently:
- https://refactoringenglish.com/tools/hn-popularity/
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 :)
I do visit pretty often along with https://news.ycombinator.com/pool
hckrnews.com is my go to and has been for years
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'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.
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.
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.
I like the more curated homepage, it sorts out of a lot of the promotions for people seeking VC.
/active is FAR better.
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).
> '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.
"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.
fact is, this one made its way from /newest to "/".
And yet, indeed, it is up to us to weigh in for better content.
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.
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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.