HN Explorer

Ask HN: Why No 'Save' Feature?

20 points by rman666 ↗ HN
Sorry if this is a FAQ. Why is there no feature to just save a news item so I can mark it for later reading and then decide if I want to vote on it? I know this isn't Reddit, but it sure would be useful, IMHO. Or, is this feature available, and I just missed it?

21 comments

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mooism2
Why not bookmark it in your web browser?
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rman666
Why not have HN save it so I can find it even if I'm not using my personal browser. Isn't that part of the reason why we have accounts on HN, so we don't have to save everything on our personal systems ... so we can rely on HN remember things about/for us?
jsonscripter
This sounds like feature bloat to me. Next thing you'll want is a friend and foe system, and all other reddit features...
mooism2
Why not save it on Delicious, so you don't have to use your personal browser and HN doesn't get feature bloat?
ErrantX
+1 for this.

At the moment I am saving comment links etc. for great comments in a versioned text document - it's not great :(

uptown
Check this Firefox extension out: http://readitlaterlist.com/firefox/
rman666
Of course, I use FF, and most HN'ers probably do, too. But, not everyone does. HN could add this functionality for us so we don't each need to add it ourselves. Thanks for pointing it out, however. It does look very good.
Tichy
If it is interesting enough to save, maybe it warrants an upvote?
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maurycy
Upvoted articles are saved. If it is worth saving, it is worth upvoting as well.
knowtheory
That's not always true for me. There are articles which i -might- find interesting, but i don't have time to read them right now. Should i upvote them anyway? I typically like to read them, then judge whether they deserve an upvote (based on their content, not based on whether i agree w/ the post or not).
iamwil
use instapaper.com If you really think it's great, find it on searchyc.com then upvote. For me, it's fine that I got to read it instead of upvoting. Besides, if you can't find it on the front page after you saw it there, your one vote can't make it raise anyway.
sahaj
i use google reader and mark articles as "keep unread" that i want to read later.

also, there are many companies that offer bookmarking services that integrate really nicely into the browser and only require a click of a button; you can give one of those a try.

sireat
I use delicious for saving and noticed I am not alone on more heavily discussed HN threads.
jeremymims
The real advantage to a "save" option is that HN can create a set of "most saved" articles. Although it might not end up looking much different than the Hacker News home page at first, in time this might end up being a good reference set of important things to read when starting a startup.
bendotc
But rman666 isn't requesting that up-voted articles be saved (they already are), he's asking that he be able to save articles he hasn't yet read. So the big list of saved articles would be the big list of articles with interesting titles. However, since you're probably more interested in what got up-voted, I have good news for you.

We already have the best-of-HN list: http://news.ycombinator.com/best . However, the bad news is that it's not normalized to the ratio of views to up-votes, and since score magnitude seems to be positively related to HN population at the time of submission (not to mention time of day, day of the week, etc.). At the least, it's heavily skewed towards recent articles.

In general I believe the voting systems on this site and others to be pretty crude and problematic, and while it works for finding a reasonably interesting set of articles, I suggest extreme skepticism towards looking at the best-of-list as "a good reference set of important things to read when starting a startup" any more than going through the Slashdot archives is a good thing for a budding systems administrator.

bendotc
The feature request thread is here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=363 . The page footer has a permanent link to it, so I believe that's the place pg would like feature requests to go.

FWIW (probably not much), I'm -0 on this suggestion. As others have pointed out, bookmarks (browser or social) work very well for saving things to read later, not only on HN, but on any website.

While an up-vote already saves links, I wouldn't suggest up-voting things you haven't yet read, so I don't think that's quite the right answer to your request.