193
Tell 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.
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.
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.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/classic
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:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46079803
I really like https://news.ycombinator.com/best?h=24 with the GET parameter for hours.
I like /active personally which will show controversial topics.
https://news.ycombinator.com/active
Nice I didn’t know even know about that one, it doesn’t show up in the top bar for me
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.
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.
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 do visit pretty often along with https://news.ycombinator.com/pool
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
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 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.
> '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'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.
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.
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.
"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.
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
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
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.”
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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 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?
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)?
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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.
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.
[dead]
[flagged]
[flagged]
tips fedora