Honestly, I’m kind of surprised more people do not use the favorite feature to bookmark interesting links / posts. 96 favorites on the most favorited seems really low.
20k+ karma here and same. I haven't favorited so much as a single article. Didn't realize it was an option.
So the top favorited list is probably biased in some way towards the type of people more likely to discover and use this feature. I just don't know exactly what that entails.
I've noticed these and that's probably only because I trained myself to look carefully at stuff (that was a lot of work too). Small, light grey font on a beige background, well, what did HN expect.
Yeah, that's a separate but related issue: HN's UI is too low contrast to the point of posing an accessibility issue. It kind of tells you everything you need to know about YCombinator (and maybe SV VC in general) that its biggest watering hole doesn't make even this basic concession towards accessibility.
My only issue with the website is the little minimize "-" sign on comments is too small and difficult to reliably hit without zooming in. However as you say everything else works much more smoothly than any of the apps I've tried
I only ever use private browsing and don’t want to have to log in every time I want to upvote someone.
The content is saved unless I explicitly reload or navigate away from the content. So I can close the app and come back to exactly where I was rather than the browser that will not save that state and then try to reload even if I don’t have an internet connection.
Navigation is easier in the app, because every action is clicking anywhere on the post and selecting an action from a large pop up menu. Except for collapsing/expanding which is also easier because you click the post header not just a tiny dash.
Automatic dark/light mode.
Etc. Etc. The app I use isn’t perfect but it’s preferable for lots of reasons to visiting the site directly.
I also only use private browsing mode, but the login annoyance is not enough to make me use an app. Most apps in fact track like crazy (potentially even third-party apps for sites like HN), and the whole point of private browsing is to not be tracked.
Instead I just lurk most of the time since I'm too lazy to log in, which means I'm not really contributing with votes. Maybe what we need to do is reduce the friction in logging in. I've always turned off the browser's password saving features and use my own password manager; maybe I should reconsider that policy.
[edit] Nevermind, apparently Firefox can't remember passwords when in permanent private browsing mode. So much for that idea :/
Better imo to use a bookmarking service that works across the entire web. I used to save facebook links and bookmark tweets too because the features were in those platforms, but eventually I just started using Pocket like I use for everything else on the web.
Because "stories" (i.e. top-level posts) are easily searched and retrieved. Individual comments however might have more value being favorited, and while the numbers are likely similarly low, they would make for a better blog post.
I switch computers frequently (desktop, chromebook, laptop, phone, etc.) so having some kind of centralized 'favorites' is nice. I've not used the bookmark sync with Firefox or such.
I've noticed that I rarely go back and look at my favorites though.
I use it pretty often. There are stories, show HN apps, or just random coding things that I feel I may want to have access to in the future, but are in a domain don't have enough of an interest in to bookmark. I guess if I had a generic "misc." bookmark folder that I didn't care to organize it would go here but I like keeping browser bookmarks minimal.
On that note, if there's a feature that I would like to see implemented on HN is that favoriting an article shouldn't redirect to the favorites page, instead just working with AJAX (do people still use that term?)
Not really surprised anymore because this has been discussed in the past but still perplexed why this is the case. I use the feature intensively and I find it useful. UX could be improved though, especially I'd like to be able to favorite a comment with a single click/tap, very much like voting up or down.
I guess there also are a lot more stories (over 24 million, it seems) than regular users. Even taking your 27 as the average per user, I would expect the average number of time an article gets favored to be significantly below 1.
Indeed I do have hundreds of favorites, going back till 2012. What you are looking at are just my favorited stories, but I have a lot more favorite comments. Funnily your comment kind of supports my point that the UX could be improved;-)
Also a disclaimer for those looking at my favorites: I use this feature much like a bookmarking service and for me a favorite means an endorsement only in the sense that I found the contribution interesting and valuable enough to be remembered.
I don't necessarily agree with what is said in the postings I favorite.
One thing I wish were possible is to search through upvoted content and favorited content by title and even comments in either. I have upvoted so much stuff a lot of it becomes harder to find if I cant narrow it down by what is relevant to me. Its the one killer feature HN is missing for me. Outside of that one thing I think HN is perfect thus far.
Mostly the favorites feature is used by me when I cant upvote something since thats what HN defaults to. I would use it more often if I could filter by my own saved content.
I don't think I've ever seen this on any third party search tools for HN. If it's an actual feature it is highly under documented. The filtering that HN does is on all comments / stories (by post title) but you don't get to filter down by what a user has upvoted since that data is private to the user, only favorited data is public.
I don't think this is a feature creep, I think it's useful. Otherwise I'm going to have to code something to scrape through HN for me and provide that additional context, and even then I still would be missing a way to filter down on HN comment data vs my own local db of upvoted materials.
Oh, sorry, I didn't read / comprehend your comment properly earlier.
Firstly, try contacting hn@ycombinator.com detailing what you'd like to build and see if they're interested / able to collaborate or provide you the necessary access / APIs.
I'm not a programmer by any stretch of the imagination, but have contacted the mods from time to time and found them eminently approachable.
Secondly, if you can't see the up or down vote buttons, try clicking on a comment or submissions time stamp immediately after the username. For reasons I don't know sometimes the vote buttons aren't displayed in the regular view.
Seems pretty silly that you can only favourite the comments view - if you click directly into the article from HN homepage you never see the favourite link at all.
Wow. Abismal number. I dreamt a side project of using that info to estimate “taste distance” between users and see what personalized recommendations come out of it, but I dont think it would work with those numbers.
On the site since 2012. Never noticed favorite until right now. Was surprised to see I had 3 favorites saved already which all must have been inadvertent clicks.
I have another tool (Pocket) that I use for bookmarking interesting posts for later reading/reference that works independently of which site I happen to be on.
Another hidden feature is 'top links'(https://news.ycombinator.com/best). It is not visible to me (may be because of low karma), but if I directly type it in the url it works.
A lot of people have pointed out alternatives, but the killer feature of eg bookmarks (or maybe pocket?) is the categorization.
I have bookmarks that I've planned to review in 3 months. I'll have bookmarks for a tool I plan to try out on a future side project
I don't really care about the "how" (I take notes for various things -- books, movies, apps -- all over the place). But bookmarks are convenient and allow for the simplest of categorization, which I value
more people do not use the favorite feature to bookmark
Why would you, when upvoting achieves the same effect and is available with one less click? If you could "favorite" an itme from the front page then I expect the feature would get more use.
Why would I use this instead of my browser's bookmarks, which have tags, folders, and search, and are less likely to be discontinued by the product storing them?
For me, the answer is that my browser bookmarks are tied to a physical machine and specific browser. I use many machines, and sometimes many different browsers on each.
Besides being tied to your account, the only plus I see of HN bookmarks over browser bookmarks is that your HN bookmarks are shared with the public. Some people may want to keep their favorites private, though.
It depends on how you define "active", but if you click on the Lists link at the bottom of this page, and then on Leaders, you find an ordered list of the users with the most points: https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders.
It might be embarrassing to admit but I use 'threads' as my bookmark service - if something was engaging/striking/funny enough for me to comment on, then I want to come back to it.
At some point I will write a thingy to go grab all my old comments but for now HN is more useful to me than pocket / delicious etc.
It turns out to be a useful heuristic - the mental process that says "I should store that for later" fails far more often than "that is something I have something vaguely useful to say about".
Why use website-specific favorites instead of browser favorites? Isn’t it inconvenient to have bookmarks siloed across different websites? My browser bookmarks work on any website, are synced across devices and backed up automatically (Safari), and are easily searchable and organized via folders or tags.
"Most active" in this case means "posting the most comments". That's an interesting subset to look at but there's no reason it would be correlated with heavy use of the favorites feature.
I agree, the majority of people who visit content aggregators tend to be readers, not commenters, and therefore there is no necessary correlation between commenting and bookmarking.
68k users have used the favorite feature, on 1.7M posts. It's not widely used by HN standards, but that's certainly not "almost no-one".
You can also gauge it by how many people rushed to this thread to post "please don't remove the feature" when someone mentioned we had thought about removing it.
Follow up questions when you want to measure adoption:
- 68k users out of how many users on HN? This is the metric that really matters when you want to consider how wide the adoption is.
- Number of users may not be very easy to evaluate as there's throwaway accounts, inactive accounts and the like, so ideally you would need to account for the people who log on at least once every month or something.
- Among those, you would need to filter those who actually use the feature regularly vs the ones who just used the feature once and never used it again. Look like the average is at 25 per user based on the data you provided, but I am guessing there are users with 100s of favorites so that means there are people at the end of the tail as well, with just a few, which should not be counted as "active favorite users".
By the way @dang, is there any hidden function on HN to see some HN related stats?
Surprised to see my project at the top, considering how old it is. Also surprised by the very low number of favorites overall; I use that feature quite often.
The fact that favorites are a hidden feature and hard to use made me think the quality of the curation signal would be even better. Also the fact the HackerNews API, Angolia don't expose this feature made it even more interesting to aggregate.
Hope you like it and as it was a pain gathering the data, I put it in an observable notebook so hopefully we don't need to gather that dataset again for a while.
The learning resources were the most useful thing to me. I have seen most of those links whoosh by me when reading HN, but this list has made me revisit some of them that were lost to the sands of time. In particular the bash shell resource [1] is something I have been trying to re-find for ages!
HN's minimalist UI designed to make elements unobtrusive and sometimes difficult to see, and new features being mentioned only in a single thread means most users will just not notice. It also doesn't help that HN is a conservative culture generally antagonistic towards any change to the layout, and people wouldn't want to notice those changes to begin with.
I've seen people not notice thread folding or the hide feature despite those also being "in plain sight." People don't know threads can span multiple pages - dang has to go out of his way to point that out because despite the UI being exactly the same as on the list pages, a "more" link at the bottom of the page, no one ever reads past the first thirty links on those pages to begin with.
It's relatively new. Before we used upvotes. Actually I still don't use it and keep using upvotes to favourite stories. I'm sorry for that and even worse: sometimes I upvote a story without following the link, just using the upvote as a "read later" bookmark because I found the title intriguing. Not so bad is when I upvote because there's a very interesting comment, even though the article itself is crappy.
Time ago someone posted a script that collects upvoted stories, but I can't find it now, it's in one of those upvoted stories O:) I guess I could make a conversion... but there are probably more than a thousand upvoted stories, I don't know.
Actually I still don't use it and keep using upvotes to favourite stories. I'm sorry for that
So do I, but I'm not going to apologize for it. Upvoting is the fastest and more convenient way to save a story as "read later", so it's what I do. If they would add the "favorite" link to the front-page items, I'd use it instead of upvoting.
It's not the most used function because browsers already have a 'favorite' function, bookmarks. I used a scrapbook extension in FireFox for years so even though I know it existed I've never used it. But this post actually serves to shine some light on it and I'll give it a shot for a few weeks to see how well it works for me. HN has some amazing threads every now and then and it is really worth remembering those.
When I emailed mods to argue that the 'web' button should be restored[1], I was told by dang that he was actually considering removing 'hide' and 'favorite' too, because people rarely use those features. (I routinely use 'hide' but hardly ever use 'favorite'.)
Btw, 'favorite' may be lesser-known but it's certainly not hard to use.
I'd personally find removing favorite rather frustrating as it's a nice way of differentiating posts than just upvoting so that I can easily find them again in the future...
> was told by dang that he was actually considering removing 'hide' and 'favorite' too, because people rarely use those features.
That's something you do with a corporate site where you're constantly A/B testing and aggressively removing features that don't generate revenue. Hacker News isn't (or shouldn't be) run that way. It's perfectly fine to have features only a few people use.
Removing features to decrease maintenance overhead is also a pretty legit reason, and you don't have to be a corporate site for that to apply to you (I would say it applies even more to a hobby site).
That said, I really hope favorites isn't removed because even though I only discovered the feature a few years ago, I really cherish the comments I've favorited.
Also, “it’s not used frequently” is a really bad reason to remove a feature. Frequency of use is not a proxy for usefulness. I don’t use my backup software’s “restore” feature often but that doesn’t mean it should be removed.
Standard MO of software engineers is to rewrite code into the latest and greatest framework/language/style every couple of years to keep the resume fresh.
Yikes, what a horror: either no new features, or complexity increases forever. Fortunately we don't live in that prison. And what a dystopian reason you give for removing things!
The humane reason, of course, for removing features, is so you can add new ones while staying simple. I have always found this to be a deep part of, let's call it, healthy software development, at every level. If you remove things as well as add them—code, features, complexity–then the system can breathe over time. When I say "the system" I include the programmers and the community as well as the code—the whole thing. If you're only allowed to add, that's no longer a creative process, just agglutination.
>Yikes, what a horror: either no new features, or complexity increases forever. Fortunately we don't live in that prison.
And fortunately, I didn't suggest that we do, or that features should never be removed... rather that removing a feature that people use because not enough of them use it doesn't make sense for a site like this.
If you want more people to use new features, I think you need to put more effort than you do into making those features more visible. Feature discovery is a problem - there's plenty of anecdotal evidence here to attest to that.
I can think of a couple of possible solutions, such as having new features be bold for a while after being first introduced, so they're more easily noticed, or pinning a thread announcing new site features, or having something like a devlog listing possible and new changes and comments related to development, to better engage the community in the process (or at least raise their awareness that the site is still being actively worked on,) etc. Or all of those.
Removing "hide" is the wrong call. People, especially in work environments, need to be able to hide links for all sorts of reasons. For example, if you work at Apple and there is an inflammatory article or if you've recently lost a family member to suicide and there is an article on a famous figure in the tech community committing suicide like Aaron Swartz, you probably don't want to see that on the homepage of HN for the day. It's one of the best features of Reddit and HN, imo.
Hide is super useful for threads you want to read but have the typical knee-jerk flamebait war responses at the top that turn into massive comment trees that you want to skip.
The population of commenters seems to be dominated by those whose goal is to argue and win, rather than to understand and learn. So many times I see comments that make no attempt to take context into account, and instead conflate all sorts of things, making it impossible to comment productively. (Basic example: Top comment has not replied to the thesis of the article, but to something else.) When one of these types of comments is at the top of the comments list I just hide the whole story, because there’s literally nothing to see but people talking past each other.
Favorite is one of my most used features. Please don't remove it, dang! :(
I frequently go back to these stories, whereas I don't often care to find things I upvoted again. If the two features become conflated, I'll probably stop upvoting so that I can use upvoted stories and posts as a bookmarking system.
Please keep favorite stories and posts around.
If you're worried about feature utilization, maybe name it "save" for better discoverability. That's essentially what I use the feature for.
I don't trust or use browser bookmarks much anymore. HN favorites are high quality bookmarks that work across all my browsers and devices.
Save is a better name. OP has updated list of favourite stories and many of the Ask HN posts make the list because they often yield a lot of useful information in the comments. I use SQL on a daily basis so most of my favourites are SQL stories. I use favourite to bookmark post and comments.
Why wouldn't it be? Unless you're trying to flag stuff a year after it's been posted, I would expect at least that a posted link would be accessible to read.
Unless what you mean is "inaccessible" in the sense of "not accessible to people with disabilities," in which case, good luck flagging a large percent of everything that gets posted. :/
Favorite gets indirectly used when an up vote cannot be given to a post and a thread is what I've noticed, which would beg the question what would happen if those buttons got removed? I think it would be a shame if hide and favorite were removed, it might be a minor feature but I have used it in the past to make it easier to ignore certain posts.
The "favorites" feature is amazing and just rightly inconspicuous. On my website, https://mihir.ch/#hn, I've been collecting and displaying my favorited posts and comments from an API I created for this purpose only.
it's nice that HN at least acknowledges that whether you like something or not is something that only matters for you, and no one else, rather than pretending there is value in centering a surfacing algorithm around it.
That is very good, if only a HN-lore exist, there are some links that are submitted to HN regularly, and every 6 months new people discover them.
Great stories people here like sharing, articles, books, etc.. create a ranked list of HN folklore and traditions.
Thanks for the link! I've been looking for such a feature that shows me the most popular posts within a given timeframe. My thought process was that, as much as I enjoy discussions on HN, I don't want to spend too much time on it and, in particular, I want to avoid browsing HN out of FOMO multiple times a day. Instead I'd rather just schedule half an hour to an hour every week to have a look at the most popular posts.
I've occasionally looked at the favorites of highly active users (e.g. the list of karma leaders), and I've rarely found other users to have used the feature. As for me, I love using it – it has the right amount of friction such that I only end up using it for things that really are my favorite. I never look through my own upvote history. But whenever I need to find something that I remember being great, it's almost always in my favorites list.
My only complaint with the favorite feature is that after favoriting, it takes you to your favorites page, versus an async request leaving you in place with the comment or post favorited.
That's funny, I always thought it was intentional. Because the slight inconvenience of the favoriting action definitely makes me more selective in using it.
I suppose the public nature of the favorites list (as opposed to upvoted list) will still have that self-filtering effect.
It was intentional, but the intention was feature discovery. We did it that way in the hope that people would get to know the favorites page and start browsing the favorites of others. It doesn't seem to have had that effect; it's just a pain. I suppose we could put up a confirmation screen first: "Do you want to add 'foo' to your favorites?" But that might just be a pain too.
There's another discovery issue, which is that not everyone knows that favorites are public. Publicness was the primary reason we built the feature: the hope that it would be a new way of finding interesting stories. One can see that happening in this thread to some extent. Overall, though, I was disappointed that it didn't have more of this effect, which is why I considered removing it.
Perhaps we just didn't do enough to promote it. Someone suggested having a quarterly post about the most-favorited stories. That might be a good way. We could have different most-favorited lists based on different subsets of users. We could ask people which accounts have the most interesting favorites. and so on.
268 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 243 ms ] threadSo the top favorited list is probably biased in some way towards the type of people more likely to discover and use this feature. I just don't know exactly what that entails.
There are probably many HN features nobody knows about because the UI doesn't expose them.
The content is saved unless I explicitly reload or navigate away from the content. So I can close the app and come back to exactly where I was rather than the browser that will not save that state and then try to reload even if I don’t have an internet connection.
Navigation is easier in the app, because every action is clicking anywhere on the post and selecting an action from a large pop up menu. Except for collapsing/expanding which is also easier because you click the post header not just a tiny dash.
Automatic dark/light mode.
Etc. Etc. The app I use isn’t perfect but it’s preferable for lots of reasons to visiting the site directly.
Instead I just lurk most of the time since I'm too lazy to log in, which means I'm not really contributing with votes. Maybe what we need to do is reduce the friction in logging in. I've always turned off the browser's password saving features and use my own password manager; maybe I should reconsider that policy.
[edit] Nevermind, apparently Firefox can't remember passwords when in permanent private browsing mode. So much for that idea :/
I use this. It is very good imo -https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=io.github.hidr...
Which mobile app do you mean? HN has no app. But there are many third-party ones.
This is actually leading to some unanticipated problems. I wrote about this yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24335289.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24352253
I've noticed that I rarely go back and look at my favorites though.
But still lower than expected.
Spoiler: Steven Hawking has died.
I guess there also are a lot more stories (over 24 million, it seems) than regular users. Even taking your 27 as the average per user, I would expect the average number of time an article gets favored to be significantly below 1.
Also a disclaimer for those looking at my favorites: I use this feature much like a bookmarking service and for me a favorite means an endorsement only in the sense that I found the contribution interesting and valuable enough to be remembered. I don't necessarily agree with what is said in the postings I favorite.
Mostly the favorites feature is used by me when I cant upvote something since thats what HN defaults to. I would use it more often if I could filter by my own saved content.
One of the things I super appreciate about HN is the (almost) complete abcense of feature creep.
I don't think this is a feature creep, I think it's useful. Otherwise I'm going to have to code something to scrape through HN for me and provide that additional context, and even then I still would be missing a way to filter down on HN comment data vs my own local db of upvoted materials.
Firstly, try contacting hn@ycombinator.com detailing what you'd like to build and see if they're interested / able to collaborate or provide you the necessary access / APIs.
I'm not a programmer by any stretch of the imagination, but have contacted the mods from time to time and found them eminently approachable.
Secondly, if you can't see the up or down vote buttons, try clicking on a comment or submissions time stamp immediately after the username. For reasons I don't know sometimes the vote buttons aren't displayed in the regular view.
I have bookmarks that I've planned to review in 3 months. I'll have bookmarks for a tool I plan to try out on a future side project
I don't really care about the "how" (I take notes for various things -- books, movies, apps -- all over the place). But bookmarks are convenient and allow for the simplest of categorization, which I value
Why would you, when upvoting achieves the same effect and is available with one less click? If you could "favorite" an itme from the front page then I expect the feature would get more use.
The globally most-favorited is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19087418 ("Ask HN: What books changed the way you think about almost everything?") with 836 faves. You can see the global top 50 here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24355617
https://console.cloud.google.com/marketplace/details/y-combi...
Is any data available on their locations? Demographics?
At some point I will write a thingy to go grab all my old comments but for now HN is more useful to me than pocket / delicious etc.
It turns out to be a useful heuristic - the mental process that says "I should store that for later" fails far more often than "that is something I have something vaguely useful to say about".
I try to only favourite the cream of the crop, in the hopes someone will stumble into my favourites list and enjoy them.
I mostly favourite comments not submissions though.
I did. Thank you!
For the individual user there is zero reason.
You can also gauge it by how many people rushed to this thread to post "please don't remove the feature" when someone mentioned we had thought about removing it.
- 68k users out of how many users on HN? This is the metric that really matters when you want to consider how wide the adoption is.
- Number of users may not be very easy to evaluate as there's throwaway accounts, inactive accounts and the like, so ideally you would need to account for the people who log on at least once every month or something.
- Among those, you would need to filter those who actually use the feature regularly vs the ones who just used the feature once and never used it again. Look like the average is at 25 per user based on the data you provided, but I am guessing there are users with 100s of favorites so that means there are people at the end of the tail as well, with just a few, which should not be counted as "active favorite users".
By the way @dang, is there any hidden function on HN to see some HN related stats?
Hope you like it and as it was a pain gathering the data, I put it in an observable notebook so hopefully we don't need to gather that dataset again for a while.
The learning resources were the most useful thing to me. I have seen most of those links whoosh by me when reading HN, but this list has made me revisit some of them that were lost to the sands of time. In particular the bash shell resource [1] is something I have been trying to re-find for ages!
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17057596
I've seen people not notice thread folding or the hide feature despite those also being "in plain sight." People don't know threads can span multiple pages - dang has to go out of his way to point that out because despite the UI being exactly the same as on the list pages, a "more" link at the bottom of the page, no one ever reads past the first thirty links on those pages to begin with.
Time ago someone posted a script that collects upvoted stories, but I can't find it now, it's in one of those upvoted stories O:) I guess I could make a conversion... but there are probably more than a thousand upvoted stories, I don't know.
If you didn’t know, you can “favorite” comments, too.
So do I, but I'm not going to apologize for it. Upvoting is the fastest and more convenient way to save a story as "read later", so it's what I do. If they would add the "favorite" link to the front-page items, I'd use it instead of upvoting.
Most active was defined by comment count.
Btw, 'favorite' may be lesser-known but it's certainly not hard to use.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23762479
That's something you do with a corporate site where you're constantly A/B testing and aggressively removing features that don't generate revenue. Hacker News isn't (or shouldn't be) run that way. It's perfectly fine to have features only a few people use.
That said, I really hope favorites isn't removed because even though I only discovered the feature a few years ago, I really cherish the comments I've favorited.
...Exactly. It's been a feature forever, it complicates the codebase, and no one ever uses it.
Two examples[0,1].
[0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7033047
[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2445039
Hardly ever see it used in any capacity though.
Re gp: removing buttons shown on every page is probably more about simplifying interface and reclaiming space than maintenance overhead.
The humane reason, of course, for removing features, is so you can add new ones while staying simple. I have always found this to be a deep part of, let's call it, healthy software development, at every level. If you remove things as well as add them—code, features, complexity–then the system can breathe over time. When I say "the system" I include the programmers and the community as well as the code—the whole thing. If you're only allowed to add, that's no longer a creative process, just agglutination.
And fortunately, I didn't suggest that we do, or that features should never be removed... rather that removing a feature that people use because not enough of them use it doesn't make sense for a site like this.
If you want more people to use new features, I think you need to put more effort than you do into making those features more visible. Feature discovery is a problem - there's plenty of anecdotal evidence here to attest to that.
I can think of a couple of possible solutions, such as having new features be bold for a while after being first introduced, so they're more easily noticed, or pinning a thread announcing new site features, or having something like a devlog listing possible and new changes and comments related to development, to better engage the community in the process (or at least raise their awareness that the site is still being actively worked on,) etc. Or all of those.
A lot of times the good stuff is at the bottom.
The population of commenters seems to be dominated by those whose goal is to argue and win, rather than to understand and learn. So many times I see comments that make no attempt to take context into account, and instead conflate all sorts of things, making it impossible to comment productively. (Basic example: Top comment has not replied to the thesis of the article, but to something else.) When one of these types of comments is at the top of the comments list I just hide the whole story, because there’s literally nothing to see but people talking past each other.
I frequently go back to these stories, whereas I don't often care to find things I upvoted again. If the two features become conflated, I'll probably stop upvoting so that I can use upvoted stories and posts as a bookmarking system.
Please keep favorite stories and posts around.
If you're worried about feature utilization, maybe name it "save" for better discoverability. That's essentially what I use the feature for.
I don't trust or use browser bookmarks much anymore. HN favorites are high quality bookmarks that work across all my browsers and devices.
Unless what you mean is "inaccessible" in the sense of "not accessible to people with disabilities," in which case, good luck flagging a large percent of everything that gets posted. :/
The API: https://hn-faves.now.sh
Source: https://github.com/plibither8/hn-faves-api
Usually I'd use puppeteer, but that would make it like 400mb. I've never heard of [1] x-ray, it looks a great package for lightweight containers!
[1] https://www.npmjs.com/package/x-ray
Edit: found it, it's Algolia. Thought s/he was talking about Angola.
I suppose the public nature of the favorites list (as opposed to upvoted list) will still have that self-filtering effect.
There's another discovery issue, which is that not everyone knows that favorites are public. Publicness was the primary reason we built the feature: the hope that it would be a new way of finding interesting stories. One can see that happening in this thread to some extent. Overall, though, I was disappointed that it didn't have more of this effect, which is why I considered removing it.
Perhaps we just didn't do enough to promote it. Someone suggested having a quarterly post about the most-favorited stories. That might be a good way. We could have different most-favorited lists based on different subsets of users. We could ask people which accounts have the most interesting favorites. and so on.