Ask HN: A Favorites feature for Hacker News? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: A Favorites feature for Hacker News?

7 pointshkarthik10 comments

It would be nice to have a way to "favorite" an HN post. I enjoy the comments in HN a lot, and will often search for links I've gotten through Twitter, Email, etc to see what the HN community thinks about an article or blog post.

HN has basically become a system of record to me, so I would prefer to have my favorite HN posts stored directly in my HN profile rather than try to keep a list of bookmarks elsewhere.

I know there's a million different ways to hack something in with a secondary bookmark system for this, perhaps even with browser plugins, but I feel like having favorites built into the site would be awesome and useful for everyone.

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It exists, in many forms. The best of them is called Pinboard.

How would that be different from "saved stories"?

No different really. But maybe I don't want to "save" every story that I upvote?

At first I was like, "Wow that's neat that it saves what I upvote"

But after being here for 6 years, my "favorites" are a mess, as one could imagine.

The 'save' side-effect provides an incentive to upvote which, in turn, improves the quality of the site for all. Separating save and upvote would break this.

It would allow you to "save" something without requiring you to upvote it. Personally, I would find this very valuable. I often upvote things solely because the title looks vaguely interesting, just to "save" them - even though the item may not turn out to be worth of an upvote.

Sometimes you want to upvote a story but you don't want to save it. And sometimes you want to save a story without upvoting it. As it is every story you upvote is saved which can make it hard to find the few you would like to have favorited. If you use the saved stories as your favorites, which I do, you end up not upvoting stories which deserve it just to keep your "favorites" more manageable.

There's a plethora of HN add-ons in this thread, but apparently none for bookmarking, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8188835

Instapaper's bookmarklet works on HN. The free service can export the last 2000 links in a single html file.

Call me crazy, but I use the upvote button for upvoting and I use my browser's bookmark to bookmark.

There is a 'bug and feature request' link at the bottom of this and many other pages.

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