Ask HN: How much time do you spend on the “New” page? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How much time do you spend on the “New” page?

I know this is meta but I have been thinking a lot about how the content that ends up on the front page is less technical than it has been in the past. One reason is because I feel a lot of people are leaving their votes on the table and not voting up new content regularly. Am I wrong in this? What's your mix of time spent reading vs voting?

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I spend maybe 30 minutes a day on New and just a minute or two on the Front Page. New is where all the interesting and thoughtful stuff is. The Front Page is pretty dull. I think only one item I voted on ended up on the front page. I'm reading this on New right now. I don't recall on ever voting on the Front Page.

I look at new quite a bit but that's probably because I typically consume HN via a script which opens a text file containing: front page, ask, new, show. The entries are formatted as:

  Entry #. Title
  <link to article>
  <link to discussion>

So for example for this page it showed up as:

  18. Ask HN: How much time do you spend on the New page?
      https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18876390

This makes it easy for me to quickly consume.

P.S. It's a pretty ugly script but it's been doing the job for 4+ yrs. Feel free to grab it here: https://pastebin.com/jt7RfEbF. It'll write the output to the file o.txt.

Never been. I’m just here for the comments so the new page isn’t useful for me.

Once I'm like 10 pages deep or hit a bunch of visited links I go to new

I find the front-page itself to have poor signal-noise ratio. New is much worse. So, I stick to the main page and the "ask" page. I seldom look at the "new" page.

Not much unless I have already caught up earlier in the day, like on weekends. I usually go right to the 'Ask' page as I like reading the discussions in the comments.

I only read comments 95% of the time, so very rarely.

I visit "New" a few times a day, it's my go to when I've nothing else to do. Sadly, I hardly ever vote.

10 minutes a year.

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