Ask HN: How much time do you spend perusing new submissions? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How much time do you spend perusing new submissions?

52 pointssmithmayowa29 comments

I have been on hackernews for months and to be sincere I have not really been a benovelent citizen when it came to going through the new submissions segment not until I started really submitting posts and found myself relying on people who actually went through the new submissions segment to either upvote my submitted links or to answer my pertinent(to me) Ask Hn: questions in the new submissions segment ,and I will like to know how much time the average hackernewsers spends being a benovelent citizen perusing the new submissions segment of hackernews.

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A good question. All crowd-ranked sites like reddit, imgur and hacker news rely on the initial votes of a few to get exposure to many.

I browse "/new" quiet often. The incentive being, that my opinion (comment) is more likely to be heard and seen.

Rather than leaving a comment among 600 of opinions...

Does that work out for you? My experience is it's kind of a waste of time commenting unless it's on the front page. Even in (most) front page posts, the conversation seems to die quickly after it drops off.

Does anyone else wish HN would notify you when your comment is commented on? This pushes it into the realm of online forum software, but as someone who comments much more than they submit that essentially what HN is for me.

Yes, this is probably my number one feature request. The top level “threads” link is helpful for showing recent replies but you still have to remember to check on it every so often.

There’s a 3rd party service for that, I’ve found it to be pretty reliable. http://www.hnreplies.com/

P.s. I hope you’ll remember to check this one thread one last time :)

Well generally it doesn't pay off. I feel it's similar to being on the bleeding edge of tech, it's only worth it some of the time and it's not for everyone.

In my experience comments with 50+ upvotes almost always are comments on root or one level deep. Assuming popularity on hackernews was the goal I wonder what signals a member should look for in determining the best threads to comment on. In the past I've had success in commenting in new submissions with 3+ upvotes and 1 or fewer comments.

The ideal comment would be being the first commenter on a NYT or Bloomberg article about a tech company or law stating the majority opinion of HR audience. The trump comment on HR is being an early commenter with unique insight based on experience working inside the company being discussed.

Almost never. I'm an easy prey for procrastination, so I'm actively trying to limit my time on HN and Reddit especially. The new submissions section is thus something I actively avoid.

But I do also think it is important to check it every once in a while, for the same reasons with you. So maybe having the---say---newest 10 submissions appended to the main page would increase visibility, and we'd have more interesting stuff get the chance to see the front page.

> I'm an easy prey for procrastination

Same.

(Currently at work, procrastinating.)

Oh, you're not meant to browse the HN for "boosting your creativity" and "relieving stress from a long spree of coding"? I mean that was what I used to say when I was caught red-handed :)

I can't find the source for this but, as I recall, HN has a system where certain new or recent submissions are artificially promoted to a low position on the front page for a few minutes to see if they gain traction naturally. Also, I believe that some people (perhaps just dang and sctb, I don't know) can manually add to the pool of submissions that the algorithm will randomly draw from to temporarily promote. They don't have the power to push them directly to the front page, only to give them a chance to be selected for a few moments of spotlight.

Forgive me if I got some of that wrong, or if the system as a whole does not work like than anymore. Not exactly what was asked, but maybe helpful to someone.

EDIT: Closest source I can find: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9866140

It references a long comment from dang three years ago regarding this as an "experiment": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8790134

It seems like HN ranks a lot by recency. I have seen articles with 40 or so points high on the front page and of course highly rated articles need to leave it at some point.

Not even sure the last time I clicked "new" until you mentioned it, and I've been here since 2011.

sometimes I misclick `new` instead of _Hacker News_ and wonder how I missed all these hot takes on the frontpage

I prefer browsing http://hckrnews.com/

I can see the number of comments & points, in chronological order.

Me too. It's a great way to experience HN.

It's worth pointing out that this isn't ALL submissions. They still need 5ish points to make it out of new and on to this list I think.

I spend a bit of time most days on new submissions. With so many submissions being made there's no way some high quality content (or at least content of interest to me) won't ever make it on the front page here so I think it's worth a few minutes to see what's there.

That said, a couple months ago one of my submissions got buried quickly and about an hour later I got an email from HN telling me they "put it in the second-chance pool, so it will get a random placement on the front page sometime in the next 24 hours"

I was pretty amazed by that and it warmed my soul. They included a link to learn more about that:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380

I skim new as often as latest if not more. There is a lot of good stuff that never makes frontpage (or it takes several days until it does).

(Shameless self-plug) https://edavis.github.io/hnrss/ can help you keep a closer eye on /newest via your RSS reader, especially when using searches to limit the posts to topics you're interested in.

The Hacker News submission page dumps you into the new page whenever you make a new submission. I usually take a look at some of the other new submissions at this point. Otherwise it's fairly rare that I check the new page.

I spend more time reading new submissions than front-page submissions. There are far more new submissions, and I usually have the time to go through at least four or five pages of them, so the pool is larger. What's more, cumulative advantage boosts good submissions that, for whatever reason, enjoy a strong start and penalizes good submissions that don't get out of the starting blocks as fast.

I tend to look at the New page pretty regularly, focusing on "Ask HN" or "Show HN" titles.

Only because I feel like my upvote and/or comment is a lot more valuable there. Plus I feel bad knowing some good questions/projects are being asked/shown and they may never be seen (by that many people) if they fall off the first page without an upvote.

Every week or so I'll go to |new| and use my browser cmd+f to look for keywords I'm in the mood for (games/gaming, AI, GDPR, whatever is relevant at the time). I don't even skim otherwise.

I look at the |show|ask| sections, every couple days and look at it pretty closely (like this, although now this post is FP as well).

A lot less than 1% of my time here. Either when I just made a submission myself, or when I'm really bored.

I would spend a lot more time on them if there was an RSS feed. Same with show, ask and everything under /lists.

Here's my proposal for an alternative to the new page from a few years ago:

http://www.almostinfinite.com/other/hacker-news-new-page-scr...

Honestly only ever visit and skim it after I submit something myself. I think its mostly a time thing. If I stick to the front page (sometimes two pages) I can minimize the distraction. If I am looking at new there is always new (duh) stuff to distract me.

I get the RSS stream into Outlook so I click over there a few times a day but only spend a few seconds reading the titles.

skim. truly minimal. the one sentence hit is all.

wisdom-of-the-crowd in this case, is about summing ant-like impressions, to get scale to peek above the surface to rise to the top to accrue karma.

its hard. I am very sure interesting things just pass me by

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