Poll: How often do you check "newest"? | Hacker News Reader

Poll: How often do you check "newest"?

98 pointsColinWright115 comments

Submissions rely on early upvotes to get to the main page, and I was wondering how many people actually visit "newest" to give those submissions a chance.

It would be nice to correlate this with people who have "Show Dead" turned on, but this is a start. Polls suffer from selection bias, but it might be interesting.

Pick whichever is closest ...

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Reddit had a term for people who read the new page -- the knights of new. The small group of people who make the site work by traipsing through the sludge that is the new page, finding the gems within.

We did a lot of experiments to try and get more people to look at the new page or new content. One was placing one new item at the top of your home page and changing that every couple of minutes. The other was the "rising" sort, which was similar to the hot sort on the front page, but much higher velocity.

None of them really worked all that well. The group of people who read new are a unique breed. :)

On Reddit I often sort by new for comments (which I know isn't the same as new topics), especially on thoughts over whatever thing I'm looking up. Does Hackernews have that ability or am I being blind?

My read on HN comment sorting is that just like its frontpage, everyone sees the same comment page. New comments are added to the top, and quickly sink below others unless they are engaged with.

This is just a guess tho, as my account can't (yet?) see comment upvote counts.

No accounts (except the actual admins/mods) can see upvote counts on comments. That was a deliberate choice from a long time ago for reasons expressed at the time (by pg, IIRC) that I can't seem to locate now. The site originally made them public, but eventually made them private.

> We did a lot of experiments to try and get more people to look at the new page or new content

Is that what "best" sort is doing when browsing a specific subreddit? Occasionally I'll notice some crappy 1 minute old post on my feed that's out of place and realize the sorting was reset to "best" instead of "hot" instead

You can also just sort by "new" i.e. chronologically.

"Best" may include some new posts, I actually haven't checked, but the thing that stands out to me is how old many of the posts are. Ever since Reddit made "best" the default sort on the app I notice that any new subreddit I go to will show me at least some posts from more than two weeks ago. It's really baffling that Reddit seems to think it should be preferred over "hot".

I was going to comment I've never seen this before. Then I went to a subreddit and it hit me that I only use old reddit, which lacks the "best" feature.

I'm not sure why people tolerate the new reddit website. It is so slow, busy, and chock full of ads. When I open it on the phone you are straight up missing a lot of discussion comments, so it is broken too. You click a comment it looks like it has no subcomments under it. You click the permalink opening that comment thread in a new window, and there's still no subcomment under it. Now you prefix old. to the url, now you see the subcomments.

Makes me wonder how much discussion there is that is just not observed at all by a good fraction of the site who browses these same threads. Two universes on the same post.

I prefer the new design because the text is readable on my phone, and it has a native dark mode. I don't see any of the ads because I use an ad blocker.

Also, I have no idea what you mean about the comments thing. I can immediately see all comments other than the ones that have been collapsed due to having negative karma.

The funny thing is that all the reasons you listed to use the new design... existed before in basically any 3rd party app.

I agree, and I previously used a 3rd party app myself (Reddit Is Fun). The sad thing is that I actually completely understand why they shut down the free API access. The AI bot scrapers are absurdly aggressive, and bandwidth isn't free.

AI bot scrapers are still scraping just fine.

I don't know how else to describe it beyond what I've already done. Are you sure you are seeing all the comments? Have you tested with a post? I don't use the app fwiw. Only tested with the mobile website and it has been like this for years.

I still use old.reddit.com on the phone. Works fine with pinch and zoom. Super performant too, loads in a fraction of the time which is necessary with mobile connections and spotty coverage. I just saw the native reddit app for ios at least is like 450mb. WTF...

I don't use the native apps. They are bloated, disgusting messes. I just messed around with old.reddit and compared it to new reddit for around thirty minutes. I noticed no performance differences, and I noticed no discrepancy in comments. I don't know what to tell you. The only time I see fewer comments is when I use an incognito window, but that's just because it's not logged in.

https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1tt034b/commen...

I open this link on my iphone and I only see the top comment by /u/TallGreenhouseGuy. Below that comment, there is a link to "more replies" but it loads this exact same page with only the parent comment, no child comments. Below the parent comment, is just random reddit threads, absolutely random, along with ads. Top 3: post from /r/ghanacitizen (I am not in africa no clue how that is there....), ad from cerave for oil control shampoo, then a link to some thread in /r/learnprogramming.

https://old.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1tt034b/learn_...

This link however works fine and returns the all the child comments I was missing in that first link.

Best is best explained here:

https://web.archive.org/web/20091210094533/http://blog.reddi...

It was actually created by the XKCD team, to be better than hot.

However, they may have changed how it works since then.

Reddit, as I'm sure you know well :D, also had the advantage that non-mega subreddits would often only have a single page of new posts per day to look at. So if you were trolling subreddits direct instead of just the ones you follow (I always hated the combined view) or /r/all then it effectively functioned the same as looking at new.

Anyway, back to the original question: I don't normally follow newest regularly but if I'm on a long flight or something I might get bored and poke around there is anything else there. Often there is something good which never bubbles up.

Looking at New makes for an unfiltered experience, and you accept the nonsense that comes with that, on any platform. At that point it's still unaffected by the hivemind consensus.

What percent of the knights of new in 2026 are genuine vs sock puppets designed to seed engagement and get the snowball moving? Probably not a lot, considering most posts on reddit these days seem to come from spam bot accounts that do nothing but post identical links to dozens of subreddits. reddit now allows media accounts to post directly from their own managed accounts, violating the old rules against self promotion.

> The group of people who read new are a unique breed

literally me

Ironically, I use "new" on other sites to bypass their algorithms and see the raw stream. But I've never even had the urge here, nor really remembered it exists.

It's probably because I have always looked at HN as a sort of amusement or curiosity. The curated listing is part of the entertainment. Not because it usually resonates for me, but because it gives me this glimpse into Otherness. The comments can be more resonant, once in a while.

It's a bit like wandering through the bar district and finding your old haunts missing and replaced with weird facades and fashions. But here and there, you notice some patrons are interjecting with stories eerily similar to the one on the tip of your tongue...

Almost the only time when I check "newest" is after I submitted something myself, since then I am redirected there. But then I do read and upvote what I find interesting there (in a way diluting the score of my own submission). I really should look there more often.

Mine is usually when I fat-finger the logo on mobile and accidentally press it. Then I read 2-3 entries before realising what's happened

Only when I post, because I’m superstitious that if I don’t upvote new posts no one is gonna upvote mine.

It doesn’t work.

Twice a year, typically to see how fast my own submission is sinking into obscurity.

I consume the RSS firehose exclusively, so I guess the answer is "constantly". I have no idea which submissions are highly voted.

I tried this and it was unbearable.

Yeah, I'm certainly in the minority. I have an "all or nothing" brain problem.

To be clear, I'm not reading tons of submissions. I just don't like the idea of only being presented with the top N submissions by vote count. I'd rather scroll a feed that auto-marks each one as read until I see something interesting.

I have the same problem with YouTube. I (almost) only consume entire channels via RSS feeds (sans shorts). I never see the home page, and I only occasionally click an algorithmic recommendation.

I do the same (both here and YT). I stay away from algorithmic anything. If something is too high volume to avoid it, I'd rather avoid that something.

I do the same thing, I never really noticed what submissions are high rank or not, I just come for my own interests.

Same here. I scan the post titles to decide what to look at, and only open the HN discussion if the article looks like the discussion will be at all useful. That's increasingly rare.

I use /active more then /newest because I often am looking for a discussion already happening so I can learn from others.

I feel that new is wasted on me because I'm not confident that my own thoughts on what's interesting and worth front page promotion is well... interesting to the community.

Yea, /active is HN's secret, killer app. HN's default ranking algorithm often penalizes stories that "get too much activity" which means that if you aren't one of those guys who refreshes the main page every 5 minutes, you're going to miss a lot of newsworthy articles that happen to get many comments. I'd recommend all HN readers visit /active once at the end of the day to see what The Algorithm hid from the front page.

Those missing stories are nearly all Reddit-style political flamewars which is not what this site is for, so don't think finding something on active is some massive W.

/active is like showdead. Use it for five minutes and you'll realize why the guardrails exist in the first place.

Yep this is how I use HN as well. /new is definitely interesting when I do open it (usually after submitting) but because of the lack of existing discussion I don't usually seek it out day to day. It can definitely be rewarding though to be able to start the discussion on a new submission when it relates to an area of your own expertise though.

~monthly, when I realized I've exhausted all the front page posts I care about, but have not yet realized I should just do something better with my life

I wonder about the bias in this survey as it goes from newest to the main page.

From one that only ever opens the main page.

Where/what is newest? I see a “new” on the top page, is that what is meant?

it’s referring to the page available at /newest - the “new” link leads to it

yes, the "new" anchor links to /newest

Given that that link points to https://news.ycombinator.com/newest , yes.

I read it weekly or so and have showdead on. It would be nice to have multiple levels of dead. I want to see what’s unpopular or questionable in new, not the dating site spam. I nominate showhell as a new flag and setting for spam.

I’ve found some interesting sites from new before they were popular and started subscribing to them. This is the selfish benefit that keeps me going. It also feels good to be the first upvote on something that ends up hitting the front page.

A year or so ago, I started clicking “new” instead of the logo, which I usually click to get to the front page. I had no idea what was going on and just assumed HN had changed the algorithm and suddenly become much more active.

I think it took me between one and two weeks to realize I wasn’t actually clicking the front page.

Not the smartest sheep.

Often the frontpage will include a new submission with few votes at the top, I recall others in other threads speculating that this is an intentional way (rather than an edge case in the ranking algo) of getting new posts evaluated without people having to visit /newest

Every time I come to HN, I go to newest first before really looking at the main page.

If by newest you mean new, then I check it several times a day. It's a nice way of finding interesting content and submissions that will never make it to the Frontpage either because of bad timing or whatever reason.

Yeah, it's "newest" in the URL but labelled "new" in the menu.

If I get past page 3 without seeing anything interesting I will generally try new.

For me, it's a tripwrire. If I'm ever feeling desperate enough for new content that I'm checking the "newest" page of Hacker News, that means I need to put down my phone and reset myself.

Same

I think this would be an okay place to ask about the vouching process since it seems like a big part of the /new sifting system. When I'm browsing on /new as well as on /active (which I browse much more frequently) I'll see dead links that seem like valid posts and that I would enjoy discussing, but I'm a little worried about "over-vouching" so I tend to play it very cautious. Am I overthinking that process? Outside of running it against the guidelines/faq is there a way to see why a post was flagged?

My HN viewing habit: check frontpage quickly (only the frontpage, rarely beyond that), check "new" for 5-6 pages to see if anyone has posted something cool, and then lastly check "active" and go through every page because that's where the interesting discussions are.

I used to think the frontpage was natural and unadulterated but then I learned that dang, tomhow, et al "curate" the frontpage, so you essentially see what they want you to see, but with "active" there's less of that.

I don't think they curate it. From what I understand it is basically just "hot" submissions. However they do have the ability to bump individual submissions onto the front page if they feel a specific submission might have been of interest to the community but was previously overlooked when it was "new".

If I understand that correctly, then I think that's a nice balance. It means the front page is largely items that the community, as a general, that voted on. But it also gives the opportunity for interesting submissions to have a second chance if they did slip through the system unnoticed.

I don’t know if this is the data point you’d like, but I forget that it exists. I forget to such a point that I’m going to check out newest now because it seems like a page I should include every visit here.

So my answer is ‘never’ but I’m working on it. I keep showdead turned on.

Edit - I have been making a big mistake here for a long time. Newest is a heck of a good page and I need to make visiting it into a habit. Thanks for posting this poll; I wouldn’t have remembered that I forgot about a feature without this.

I wonder if it was ever considered to page size the first new page proportional to the current submission rate.

The idea is that with a fixed page size a new submission would get evicted off the first page quicker and would hence suffer a shorter exposure. One way to counteract that is to increase the aperture.

This of course assumes that people would scroll to the bottom and would do that more often than navigating to the next page.

I used to check a few times per month, but recently the number of submissions went through the roof, which makes me less likely to check.

Usually when I've submitted something myself.

If you email hn@ycombinator.com and ask, you might get back a more accurate approximation of newest URL hits by uniqueIP over time.

That'll have it's own set of issues, but could be of interest for numberwang fans to compare against limited self selected poll data.

Be sure to weed out hits that are HTTP/1.1, they are mostly bots. There are also obvious bots.

I go to newest when I want to check if there is an outage with GitHub or AWS or something

Here in Brazil there is a forum where before you can post your account has to sit there for 6 months after being created (that's Hardmob for those wondering which). It's a viable strategy, create a non-elistist barrier of entry for new accounts and ban shitposters in order to disencourage the sludge of low quality submissions.

Blog post fully written by AI? Sloppy repo cooked up in a weekend just for the shows? Content ripped and repackaged from another site? Irrelevant content? Notification and content removal, three strikes and the account is banned.

That and maybe a reputation system, like 100 points to be able to start submitting requests, I think it has a high chance to make dang's life easier.

/newest not so much, but I'm trying to visit /shownew (with showdeads) every now and then. I believe that's really why HN is for, and voting there a service duty.

Probably a couple of times a day to be honest. I like seeing what sort of new posts are there, especially given how long the same few topics seem to stick on the home page.

The curated list stays on the home page way too long.

I do not have showdead on, but I visit newest most times I visit HN. I'm more likely to browse the headlines/comments on the front page but click on links on newest.

I have 3 tabs pinned: homepage, active, newest

I then use https://oj-hn.com to do all my navigation via keyboard.

Whenever I interact with the main posts of Hackernews and I am interested for more, which happens almost multiple times per day or atleast once a day.

I use https://hckrnews.com/ . I prefer new over upvoted.

I have a feeling that new was much slower moving five years ago. Now if I check new everything is from the last 15-20 minutes.

Less than once a day but more than once a week. A lot of interesting stuff lies beyond the New link in the HN header.

I feel like newest is almost always spam, or low quality things. I have showdead on, so I'm kind of biased though.

Sometimes I miss when aiming for the Y logo to refresh the main page or Threads to read replies. Does that count?

I usually go through https://brutalist.report/ rather than HN's own 'new' link. It seems to filter out a lot of slop and self-promotion.

Offtopic: I posted a Show HN and it was instantly flagged. I don't know what I did wrong :(

It's a bot.

Whenever you submit a link, you get dropped on /new, so that's when I look at it.

The recents list on my browser got changed to newest so I end up checking it by accident.

I only have "new" here, and not "newest". Am I missing something?

The URL is:

  https://news.ycombinator.com/newest

The URL is /newest.

I'm a little confused by there being multiple people in the comments who are confused by this. They're basically the same word, and even if they weren't, you only have to look at the URL bar to see "newest". I know it's an unimportant phenomenon for me to be commenting on, but it strikes me as unusual.

HN is infamous for having extra "hidden" functionality you're just supposed to know exists if you want to use/unlock it.

Oh? Like what? I am actually ignorant here.

Edit: Neat. Thanks, all.

See /active

The "Lists" page, lists most of such 'hidden' functionality: https://news.ycombinator.com/lists (which itself is linked in the footer).

Downvoting/flagging kind of just "appear" for most before they get a chance to read about it being a thing.

Even when someone unlocks flagging they often don't know you can flag comments instead of just downvote them because you have to load the direct link (most easily, the timestamp link) to see it.

I actually don't remember how you're supposed to know about https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc. I'm pretty sure it's not linked on the main page and the input box doesn't make mention of it.

There are some lists out there (probably easiest to just ask AI or check the lists page) of special URLs like /bestcomments or /classic. There are also some query paramters available for certain URLs. Keep in mind the lists page is not exhaustive, e.g. /over

Many never poke around their settings enough to understand showdead or noprocrast exist/how they work.

I bet a good number learned that polls were a thing from this post :D.

That's what comes to mind but it can be hard to remember some of the things because you get ao used to them being there personally (I'm continually surprised users often reach the karma threshold for downvoting before understanding they can flag/vouch comments). I'm sure others can fill in some good ones :).

> I actually don't remember how you're supposed to know about https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc. I'm pretty sure it's not linked on the main page and the input box doesn't make mention of it.

It's in the FAQ, linked at the bottom of (almost) every page along with the guidelines.

Thanks for the reminder! I knew I found it somewhere other than Google once!

I see as a "help" url near the textarea.

To be fair, links at the top of the site header aren't exactly hidden.

I've seen comments where people haven't noticed for years that the site has a footer with links as well. The mods added thread folding and people just never even bothered to try clicking the new link to see what it did, so they never realized that was possible and kept asking for the feature. All of this "hidden" functionality is literally just a link or two away, but it might as well be buried under desert sand as far as this community is concerned.

"new", just means "new entries" (in no specific order), but "newest" suggest some sorting/ ranking. If it's the very same why would it need two different words? :) It's like people often confusing the words "art" and "artwork".

Anyway… the URL first becomes visible once you hover over the link (assuming a browser that shows the link target)/ or click on the "New" entry. If you don't know beforehand that the "New" link turns into a "newest" URL… one only can make an educated guess. Sure, I assumed it may be the same, but could have been there's some actual more obscure "Newest" somewhere too… the way the question / poll was asked it didn't feel like this was about the first top most link on the site. Hence my query for proper clarification.

Hope that clears it up. :-)

i use this as a sort of morning paper, so, every morning i press newest. sometimes i even do it in the afternoon too, if i feel adventurous.

Sometimes I want to see what kinds of submissions are dead and one minute old.

Might be interesting to try emailing dang to see if they keep track of this.

Took me a while to learn that the link above `new` points to `/newest`.

I have showdead enabled and refresh /newest probably 40 to 50 times per hour. I vouch and upvote things I think people might have interesting discussions about. I flag slop, advertising and anything that goes against the guidelines. This is the only site I log in to every day for several reasons. I sometimes take a break and play a video game, watch a movie or go for a walk. I filter out karma numbers using uBlock.

Why is it »/newest« but »new«? Or is it »new« but »/newest«?

I’ve almost entirely moved to /newest because there’s almost no point in discussion anymore

I still comment on main threads out of habit but im probably 10% as active as a decade ago once a top comment gets locked into a thread nothing else matters and there’s no discussion around the edges

All the “AI” debates are played out and boring with basically anyone still excited about anything related to AI treated poorly by people who have basically no expertise in it but mad capitalist automation came for their job

I don't even know how to check newest except by accident.

Change the link text from new to newest. Use the big word.

On mobile, shorter menu bars save screen space.

It wraps to the second line on mine.

Depending on screen and font size, it can even wrap to three or more lines. The more lines, the more vertical screen space it takes up.

somewhere in between once a week and once a day, essentially when I post something and I end up on newest I scroll down and check what there is.

Maybe once or twice a day, right after I check Top.

We have polls?

Check the FAQ link at the bottom.

New is my page 3. Comments my page 0.

Once a month is not very rarely.

I rarely go to the front page.

Very rarely, showdead on

Couple of times a year.

Twice a year

I've looked at New a few times and have been disappointed with the quality of submissions.

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