Comment by lucb1e | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lucb1e | Hacker News Reader

The thing I'm always missing on Reddit and HN is a sliding scale to tweak the time dropoff factor. For example I've been busy and check Reddit for the first time in four days. Ideally I'd see the most important stuff of the past 4 days, but the algorithm for "best" is not configurable and I roughly see what's hot today.

Another example is a thoroughly boring lesson where you just keep hitting refresh and all the links are purple already. Here I'd slide the scale to "what's new in the past 5-30 minutes?"

On reddit you can go for top posts of the day/week/month/year/alltime already and HN can do the same via the search feature. What I can't select is a granularity of less than a week and either longer or shorter than a day, and this website can't do that either, so for me at least this site has no use.

I'm not saying you (OP) should build this. It's more of a shout out to the community in general, perhaps someone has tips (e.g. an app that can do this) or someone agrees and happens to know a reddit admin and tells them... just my thoughts. That's why I'm posting this, not to make you change this site ;)

By the way, it might just be me, but the background... is more of a foreground, at least when I try to look at the website it jumps out immediately.

That's something that Digg did well. You could click "top today/24 hours/week/x days" and you would see the submissions with most diggs in 24 hours/week/days/etc.

But why not make it a sliding scale, where you can pick the past 17.3 minutes if you wish to do so?

Might be because it requires more complex database querying and/or is less cacheable.

Still... I'm unhappy with the current selection of offerings.

Reddit lets you see the top posts from the past: hour, day, week, month, year, all time.

Going from one month to a whole year is a huge jump! And personally I almost never look at top posts from the past hour.

I would love to see top posts from the past 3-months and 6-months.

Intuitively it seems like you could approximate by weighting/combining 15min and 30min caches. But also seems like a very esoteric problem!

You could potentially do this with a client side extension. RES lets you filter posts that have certain keywords or other criteria. You could perhaps add a bit of code to make it filter posts that are older than x hours/days, and then browse /top like normal, but see only new posts.

I'm more concerned about mixing posts from different subreddits. When I browse my reddit.com/top feed (sorted by past week), I see only posts from the largest subreddits I subscribe to, mainly default subreddits. I see zero posts from the smaller subreddit's I subscribe to. This is especially bad because I find the smaller subreddit's the most interesting!

Don't they still have the "multi reddits"? Just make a group for the smaller ones. Or a simple bookmark like reddit.com/r/smallsub1+smallsub2+smallsub3 etc. A bit work upfront but if you are annoyed it may very well be worth the time.

It might help a bit. But really the problem is I want to see the top 10 posts from the last week that I missed. Even grouping smaller subreddits together, /top still sorts them by the size of the subreddit and is mostly useless.

I added the RSS feed for popular HN posts from http://hnapp.com to my RSS reader.

That way the RSS reader gives me the popular posts since last time.

And because I like HN for its discussion most of all, I coded a small WebExtension to have a button to the discussion of the current page: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/hn-comments/

I definitely want this, but their goal is to have you visit their sites daily. I highly doubt they have an incentive to build this.

About the background: I want the site to have a feeling of holiday ><!

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