Poll: How often do you check "newest"?

Reddit 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. :)

Ironically, I use "new" on other sites to bypass their algorithms and see the raw stream. But I've never even had the urge here, nor really remembered it exists.

It's probably because I have always looked at HN as a sort of amusement or curiosity. The curated listing is part of the entertainment. Not because it usually resonates for me, but because it gives me this glimpse into Otherness. The comments can be more resonant, once in a while.

It's a bit like wandering through the bar district and finding your old haunts missing and replaced with weird facades and fashions. But here and there, you notice some patrons are interjecting with stories eerily similar to the one on the tip of your tongue...

Almost the only time when I check "newest" is after I submitted something myself, since then I am redirected there. But then I do read and upvote what I find interesting there (in a way diluting the score of my own submission). I really should look there more often.

Only when I post, because I’m superstitious that if I don’t upvote new posts no one is gonna upvote mine.

It doesn’t work.

Twice a year, typically to see how fast my own submission is sinking into obscurity.

I consume the RSS firehose exclusively, so I guess the answer is "constantly". I have no idea which submissions are highly voted.

I 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.

~monthly, when I realized I've exhausted all the front page posts I care about, but have not yet realized I should just do something better with my life

I wonder about the bias in this survey as it goes from newest to the main page.

From one that only ever opens the main page.

Where/what is newest? I see a “new” on the top page, is that what is meant?

I read it weekly or so and have showdead on. It would be nice to have multiple levels of dead. I want to see what’s unpopular or questionable in new, not the dating site spam. I nominate showhell as a new flag and setting for spam.

I’ve found some interesting sites from new before they were popular and started subscribing to them. This is the selfish benefit that keeps me going. It also feels good to be the first upvote on something that ends up hitting the front page.

A year or so ago, I started clicking “new” instead of the logo, which I usually click to get to the front page. I had no idea what was going on and just assumed HN had changed the algorithm and suddenly become much more active.

I think it took me between one and two weeks to realize I wasn’t actually clicking the front page.

Not the smartest sheep.

Often 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

Every time I come to HN, I go to newest first before really looking at the main page.

If by newest you mean new, then I check it several times a day. It's a nice way of finding interesting content and submissions that will never make it to the Frontpage either because of bad timing or whatever reason.

If I get past page 3 without seeing anything interesting I will generally try new.

For me, it's a tripwrire. If I'm ever feeling desperate enough for new content that I'm checking the "newest" page of Hacker News, that means I need to put down my phone and reset myself.

I think this would be an okay place to ask about the vouching process since it seems like a big part of the /new sifting system. When I'm browsing on /new as well as on /active (which I browse much more frequently) I'll see dead links that seem like valid posts and that I would enjoy discussing, but I'm a little worried about "over-vouching" so I tend to play it very cautious. Am I overthinking that process? Outside of running it against the guidelines/faq is there a way to see why a post was flagged?

My HN viewing habit: check frontpage quickly (only the frontpage, rarely beyond that), check "new" for 5-6 pages to see if anyone has posted something cool, and then lastly check "active" and go through every page because that's where the interesting discussions are.

I used to think the frontpage was natural and unadulterated but then I learned that dang, tomhow, et al "curate" the frontpage, so you essentially see what they want you to see, but with "active" there's less of that.

I don’t know if this is the data point you’d like, but I forget that it exists. I forget to such a point that I’m going to check out newest now because it seems like a page I should include every visit here.

So my answer is ‘never’ but I’m working on it. I keep showdead turned on.

Edit - I have been making a big mistake here for a long time. Newest is a heck of a good page and I need to make visiting it into a habit. Thanks for posting this poll; I wouldn’t have remembered that I forgot about a feature without this.

I wonder if it was ever considered to page size the first new page proportional to the current submission rate.

The idea is that with a fixed page size a new submission would get evicted off the first page quicker and would hence suffer a shorter exposure. One way to counteract that is to increase the aperture.

This of course assumes that people would scroll to the bottom and would do that more often than navigating to the next page.

I used to check a few times per month, but recently the number of submissions went through the roof, which makes me less likely to check.

Usually when I've submitted something myself.

If you email hn@ycombinator.com and ask, you might get back a more accurate approximation of newest URL hits by uniqueIP over time.

That'll have it's own set of issues, but could be of interest for numberwang fans to compare against limited self selected poll data.

I go to newest when I want to check if there is an outage with GitHub or AWS or something

Here in Brazil there is a forum where before you can post your account has to sit there for 6 months after being created (that's Hardmob for those wondering which). It's a viable strategy, create a non-elistist barrier of entry for new accounts and ban shitposters in order to disencourage the sludge of low quality submissions.

Blog post fully written by AI? Sloppy repo cooked up in a weekend just for the shows? Content ripped and repackaged from another site? Irrelevant content? Notification and content removal, three strikes and the account is banned.

That and maybe a reputation system, like 100 points to be able to start submitting requests, I think it has a high chance to make dang's life easier.

/newest not so much, but I'm trying to visit /shownew (with showdeads) every now and then. I believe that's really why HN is for, and voting there a service duty.

Probably a couple of times a day to be honest. I like seeing what sort of new posts are there, especially given how long the same few topics seem to stick on the home page.

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.

I have 3 tabs pinned: homepage, active, newest

I then use https://oj-hn.com to do all my navigation via keyboard.

Whenever I interact with the main posts of Hackernews and I am interested for more, which happens almost multiple times per day or atleast once a day.

I use https://hckrnews.com/ . I prefer new over upvoted.

I have a feeling that new was much slower moving five years ago. Now if I check new everything is from the last 15-20 minutes.

Less than once a day but more than once a week. A lot of interesting stuff lies beyond the New link in the HN header.

I feel like newest is almost always spam, or low quality things. I have showdead on, so I'm kind of biased though.

Sometimes I miss when aiming for the Y logo to refresh the main page or Threads to read replies. Does that count?

The MORNING CREW of Digg 4.0 is hanging out in /r/diggaspora now if you still need that New reminder

I usually go through https://brutalist.report/ rather than HN's own 'new' link. It seems to filter out a lot of slop and self-promotion.

Offtopic: I posted a Show HN and it was instantly flagged. I don't know what I did wrong :(

Whenever you submit a link, you get dropped on /new, so that's when I look at it.