As a user who has submitted the occasional Show HN and felt the sting of indifference as they gathered tumbleweeds, once a week I'll spend a few minutes going through the "New" posts and upvote anything that catches my eye.
It's a bit like donating to a charity for a illness that you or your relatives have been personally impacted by - equal parts altruism and selfishness.
This kind of thing. Particularly good “Ask HN”s fall through the cracks.
A few weeks back I was upvoting anything on the new page that wasn’t low quality posts about AI like “I vibe coded that almost works”, “Show HN: My me-too startup that’s just a Chat GPT” wrapper but that onslaught either stopped or I don’t care about it anymore.
If you look at the top sites that have articles submitted it is totally unlike the front page, a lot of nytimes.com articles are submitted for instance and get ignored. I post a lot of articles about science, engineering and diverse topics that aren’t in the word of usual front page material and only front page a few times a week for about 20 submissions a day.
> Yet I notice some users clearly dig into it, upvote good posts, and bring hidden gems to the front page.
That is how almost all of the front page items get to the front page to begin with.
> just looking for things you personally enjoy?
Mostly, plus the new feed has more variety (and more noise too) than the front page. So you'll find items you enjoy but that don't actually ever garner enough upvotes to make it to the front page.
I almost exclusively read newest posts. I’ll check front page weekly or monthly but it updates so infrequently, the dialogue is saturated, and only highly popular (not necessarily high quality) things make it there. I prefer to act as my own filter.
I read the "New" feed to read and upvote interesting posts or posts which could lead to interesting discussions if more people saw them. There's always something good there, even if signal to noise ratio is low.
Every time I have to use the "vouch" feature to save posts on new, because some psychotic users here or perhaps a psychotic auto-moderator, insists on marking perfectly good submissions as [flagged] or [dead].
As a user who has submitted the occasional Show HN and felt the sting of indifference as they gathered tumbleweeds, once a week I'll spend a few minutes going through the "New" posts and upvote anything that catches my eye.
It's a bit like donating to a charity for a illness that you or your relatives have been personally impacted by - equal parts altruism and selfishness.
This kind of thing. Particularly good “Ask HN”s fall through the cracks.
A few weeks back I was upvoting anything on the new page that wasn’t low quality posts about AI like “I vibe coded that almost works”, “Show HN: My me-too startup that’s just a Chat GPT” wrapper but that onslaught either stopped or I don’t care about it anymore.
HN has great discussions but what shows up on the front page can be kinda samey. Newest has a lot more variety in topics.
If you look at the top sites that have articles submitted it is totally unlike the front page, a lot of nytimes.com articles are submitted for instance and get ignored. I post a lot of articles about science, engineering and diverse topics that aren’t in the word of usual front page material and only front page a few times a week for about 20 submissions a day.
> Yet I notice some users clearly dig into it, upvote good posts, and bring hidden gems to the front page.
That is how almost all of the front page items get to the front page to begin with.
> just looking for things you personally enjoy?
Mostly, plus the new feed has more variety (and more noise too) than the front page. So you'll find items you enjoy but that don't actually ever garner enough upvotes to make it to the front page.
I almost exclusively read newest posts. I’ll check front page weekly or monthly but it updates so infrequently, the dialogue is saturated, and only highly popular (not necessarily high quality) things make it there. I prefer to act as my own filter.
Opposite of this, I enjoy reading the HN discussions about the submissions which have risen to the top.
The vast knowledge in the collective HN community never fails to amaze me.
I read the "New" feed to read and upvote interesting posts or posts which could lead to interesting discussions if more people saw them. There's always something good there, even if signal to noise ratio is low.
Every time I have to use the "vouch" feature to save posts on new, because some psychotic users here or perhaps a psychotic auto-moderator, insists on marking perfectly good submissions as [flagged] or [dead].
More people should check out the "New" tab.
I'm here. The Front Page doesn't seem to change much intraday (to me) and feels heavily moderated.