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Comment by eatonphil | Hacker News Reader

There's a similar issue on reddit. For a growing sub (which most interesting subs are) sorting by top of all time and top of this year is the same thing. I wish there were a way to sort by top by year on a sub (and HN too of course).

View on HN

Another effect to consider is that given that the number of "slots" on the front page hasn't changed, the time you have to rack up threshold upvotes to hit the front page will have reduced. New posts fall off the "new" page much quicker.

Might be interesting to plot the number of new posts per day over the years as well, if that data is accessible. I would guess it would inflate at the same rate.

https://redditsearch.io may help a bit with these types of queries. Bummer that there is no native way to do so.

For HN, you should know about: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=custom&page=0&prefix=false...

The Lists on HN are also useful.

https://news.ycombinator.com/lists

You'd think this is the kind of issue reddit could solve instead of figuring out how to spam you with emails faster or creating snoo avatars.

Like most social networks, history is largely irrelevant to how they make money. They need to keep you clicking on the new, the ephemeral, and the unusual, serving up ads and collecting information about your interests, hobbies, habits, and biases to refine the ad targeting.

After a year or two "most popular" no longer means much for those sites.

The problem with useful history is that it reminds people that information quality can be time-independent. I can read something written 20 years ago... anytime in the next decade, without a huge difference.

Which tends to directly clash with the temporal rat-race design used to keep customer eyeballs glued to apps for 100% of the day.

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