Honestly, I’m kind of surprised more people do not use the favorite feature to bookmark interesting links / posts. 96 favorites on the most favorited seems really low.
The globally most-favorited is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19087418 ("Ask HN: What books changed the way you think about almost everything?") with 836 faves. You can see the global top 50 here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24355617
So the top favorited list is probably biased in some way towards the type of people more likely to discover and use this feature. I just don't know exactly what that entails.
Mostly the favorites feature is used by me when I cant upvote something since thats what HN defaults to. I would use it more often if I could filter by my own saved content.
One of the things I super appreciate about HN is the (almost) complete abcense of feature creep.
I don't think this is a feature creep, I think it's useful. Otherwise I'm going to have to code something to scrape through HN for me and provide that additional context, and even then I still would be missing a way to filter down on HN comment data vs my own local db of upvoted materials.
Firstly, try contacting hn@ycombinator.com detailing what you'd like to build and see if they're interested / able to collaborate or provide you the necessary access / APIs.
I'm not a programmer by any stretch of the imagination, but have contacted the mods from time to time and found them eminently approachable.
Secondly, if you can't see the up or down vote buttons, try clicking on a comment or submissions time stamp immediately after the username. For reasons I don't know sometimes the vote buttons aren't displayed in the regular view.
I've noticed that I rarely go back and look at my favorites though.
Spoiler: Steven Hawking has died.
There are probably many HN features nobody knows about because the UI doesn't expose them.
The content is saved unless I explicitly reload or navigate away from the content. So I can close the app and come back to exactly where I was rather than the browser that will not save that state and then try to reload even if I don’t have an internet connection.
Navigation is easier in the app, because every action is clicking anywhere on the post and selecting an action from a large pop up menu. Except for collapsing/expanding which is also easier because you click the post header not just a tiny dash.
Automatic dark/light mode.
Etc. Etc. The app I use isn’t perfect but it’s preferable for lots of reasons to visiting the site directly.
Instead I just lurk most of the time since I'm too lazy to log in, which means I'm not really contributing with votes. Maybe what we need to do is reduce the friction in logging in. I've always turned off the browser's password saving features and use my own password manager; maybe I should reconsider that policy.
[edit] Nevermind, apparently Firefox can't remember passwords when in permanent private browsing mode. So much for that idea :/
I use this. It is very good imo -https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=io.github.hidr...
Which mobile app do you mean? HN has no app. But there are many third-party ones.
This is actually leading to some unanticipated problems. I wrote about this yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24335289.
I have bookmarks that I've planned to review in 3 months. I'll have bookmarks for a tool I plan to try out on a future side project
I don't really care about the "how" (I take notes for various things -- books, movies, apps -- all over the place). But bookmarks are convenient and allow for the simplest of categorization, which I value
I guess there also are a lot more stories (over 24 million, it seems) than regular users. Even taking your 27 as the average per user, I would expect the average number of time an article gets favored to be significantly below 1.
Also a disclaimer for those looking at my favorites: I use this feature much like a bookmarking service and for me a favorite means an endorsement only in the sense that I found the contribution interesting and valuable enough to be remembered. I don't necessarily agree with what is said in the postings I favorite.
Why would you, when upvoting achieves the same effect and is available with one less click? If you could "favorite" an itme from the front page then I expect the feature would get more use.
But still lower than expected.