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Comment by credo | Hacker News Reader

>>The reason is that it's not really what users want. What people come here for is good stories and comments. I doubt we have ever lost a single user over expired links.

Yes, you probably haven't lost any users over expired links

However, I think you have inconvenienced a lot of users through the expired links. Sometimes, I think it is good to spend a little bit of effort on helping a large number of users.

I'm assuming among readers (who attempt to go past page-1), an overwhelming majority has hit this problem multiple times (and lost time because of this problem)

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Amen. What a nuisance. You can keep clicking the next page button to see what other stories there are until you actually read one, after which the next page button will fail, and you'll have to start over again. What's the point of even having more than about three pages? The only way to reach those pages is to keep clicking next while carefully avoiding the temptation to read anything along the way, lest you get sent back to Level 1.

I'm not buying the argument that if HN has good stories and comments people will keep coming back and if they come back, it means they want a next page button that fails. A doesn't imply B.

If frequent expiration is to remain a feature, would it be possible to have a preference setting allowing us to put the first four pages or so on our front page? Then we could read whatever looks most interesting among the first 120 items instead of the first 30 before we get that expired next button we supposedly don't mind.

To avoid that I use this website: http://hckrnews.com/ Maybe you should take a look. Just simple and useful.

And to share everything I also use a theme for HN. It makes the design a little more as a flat design and with bigger letters which is especially what I wanted. https://github.com/gabrielecirulli/hn-special

There is also http://hackerbra.in

but I always use vanilla HN because I'm fond of it and the UI is pretty much the best for me.

That said, it would be very cool if users could implement their own custom CSS natively like you can on http://yayhooray.net

I personally detest browser extensions and I don't like how they slap custom CSS over the top of sites like make-up. Even those who aren't up for fiddling with style sheets could share in what others make.

Thank you to share. For extensions, I do like the good old design of HN but I really prefer to have bigger letters. That's mainly why I use the other one.

Thanks for your suggestion, too, nazka.

I've been a user for 5+ years, for more hours a day than I would care to admit, and have never run into an expired-link problem that couldn't be resolved with a BackButton, copy+paste.

Honestly, it gives HN a bit of charm, and it's never ever really bothered me.

However, I think you have inconvenienced a lot of users...

'Inconvenienced' is broad word. Plenty of people eventually get the hang of driving a motorcycle with the front-brake in the "wrong" spot, and are no longer inconvenienced by that. But it is not truly dangerous or troublesome in the way that having the control pedals in a Car were to be put in the wrong place (eg swap the throttle and brake pedal location). So, in this case its more an inconvenience of having some learning curve; it's not the more dangerous or nefarious inconvenience of something that is truly troublesome, random, or wasteful.

> I think you have inconvenienced a lot of users through the expired links.

I suspect that fixing expired links would improve HN's front-page story quality. I seem to recall patio11 or tptacek once saying if you really want to help out HN, you should sit on the New page and upvote stories. That's too much of a pain for me, but if I could get to pages 2-4 without friction, I'd see more non-front-page stories I could upvote. This would help good stories make it to the front page or stay there longer. So perhaps making things easier for users would also help HN. It may even make it easier for content-rich stories to compete against link-baity ones. What if fixing expired links kept HN from becoming like Reddit?

Fixing the New-page should be much easier than fixing the Front-page. In the New-page you only must remember the last index and the last submission shown, so https://news.ycombinator.com/newest?count=60&id=777777 should work, because they don’t exchange order. The Front-page is much more difficult because you must remember all the shown submissions, because they change of order in time.

Yes, but I'm not saying they should fix the New page. The New page has too many garbage submissions for me to want to spend time there. But if they fixed pages 2-4 behind the front page, I would visit those pages. Those pages have more signal-to-noise than the New page, so I want to read them. And if those pages were getting upvotes, maybe their stories would make it to the front page.

I click more. I find the stories that I am interested in. I open the submission in a new tab and the comments in a new tab. I repeat this until I get to page 4.

I read an article. I upvote it if needed. I read the comments page. I then refresh the page before making any comments. Once i've finished reading and voting and commenting i close the pages and move to the next article.

I use a method similar to the described by DanBC, but I open the comment page in a new tab and I immediately open the submission from that tab, because it’s easier to hit the back button than to remember where each story came from.

Fixing the new page is relatively easy, and it could free more closures to the other pages, so it increase the time that the links live before expiring.

I also sometimes use the “filtered 2+ new page”: http://hnapp.com/filter/d3a308f2ac9a071c0bf174e0c1a8fd22 , i.e. someone else thought that it is interesting. It’s not so painful and it’s also good for days where a single new saturate the front page.

The solution is ctrl-left click (in chrome) so articles open in a new tab in the background, queue up everything you want to read before reading the articles, simple.

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