Hacker News Reader

Comment by gus_massa | Hacker News Reader

Avoid the posts with more than 100 comments.

Try to go to https://news.ycombinator.com/newest and find interesting small post. I like when they have like 10 comments, but sometimes they have no comments and you can have a nice conversation with the author or someone of the community of HN that is an expert in the subject. [Note: Most of the post in "newest" are not interesting. You must check it for a while until you find one.]

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Also, upvoting good articles in /newest is important - if nobody looks at them and upvotes them, they'll quickly fade into oblivion. By upvoting new articles, you have a disproportionate impact on what makes it to the front page.

I'm often surprised to find that upvoting a post on new that's an hour old and with maybe two votes was enough to resurrect it.

Huh. My algorithm, exactly!

I quit slashdot when basically every story started hitting 100+ comments. When 100+ comment stories were maybe once-a-day thing, slashdot was an outstanding board.

I have noticed the rule applies very widely, including on subreddits.

Consider also https://news.ycombinator.com/shownew which is new Show HNs. It's not on the top bar so it's easy to miss. There are fewer articles but the signal to noise is higher and they all have an eager author waiting for a comment.

Honestly, this may be worth doing for a little while to see how it goes. Usually, I'll go and skim the big topics that make it to the front page, or the first few pages. "New" might be a better place to go.

I find on those that a liberal use of "[-]" and "next" make it possible to mine the slag for the good stuff.

I read /new and /comments first. I also search to see if there’s anything new in topics I’m interested in.

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