But on the topic of this active page I do find it rather poetic that in this exact thread we have people asking what is this page they’ve never heard of.
When I call it secret, I don’t mean it’s necessarily a coverup or something I mean that nobody seems to know that it exists or that the front page doesn’t actually represent what people vote for.
At this point I'm not sure what you're accusing us of, other than HN not being a different kind of site. The mandate of this place is clear (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html), and it simply isn't primarily to feature political/sensational/outrage stories. That's the root issue. The mechanics of voting, flagging, etc., are in service of that.
From my perspective, you're arguing for a health food store to devote its shelf space to chocolates and pastries. Or, if you prefer the other way round, for a confectionery to devote itself to turnips.
I was hoping however you could at least shine some light on the active page question… what percentage of users actually visit in on any given day? We can play semantic games about secret vs obscure but it’s not a debate about semantics.
I haven't looked up the number of users who visit the /active page because I don't accept the premise of your question. Of course fewer users look at it than the frontpage; otherwise it would be the frontpage. This is just another variation of the mandate argument.
I’m going to wrap this up here. You unfortunately responded in exactly the way I’d expected to just hand wave away everything, find reasons to not respond to any of the points and then seemed to misrepresent what I was even asking for.
I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with that.
Life is hard enough already and I’m not looking to make it worse for you. I hope you have a nice holiday season and good luck out there.
I'm not disinterested in answering your questions—that's why I've been replying repeatedly! Nor am I interested in making hand-wavey responses; that would be a waste of time. We must be working with different assumptions, though, because I feel like I'm answering your questions and you feel like I'm not.
If you want to try again, I'd be happy to, but maybe we could take a different approach? I would like to know what principle you care about here. What principle are we failing to abide by, that you think we ought to?