It's sort of in between. I wrote a browser extension (in Arc btw!) that has Emacs-style keyboard shortcuts that let me do things quickly. I look via HN search for related past submissions, open the relevant threads en masse in browser tabs, and build a list of IDs of the ones that are interesting. Then the browser extension sends the list of IDs to the server and gets back formatted text like you see in those lists ("title - link - mm yyyy (n comments)).

(This comes up a lot! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35668525)