Ask HN: How often do you vote on posts in the “new” tab?

Somewhat off topic, but I would welcome having a very small section of 2-3 randomly selected posts from “new” show up on top of the regular home page.

That way “doing my part” in scanning over the enormous volume of new posts becomes frictionless.

I almost never even browse by New, but when I post a post I wish more people did heh

Sites like Reddit and HN really need to display new and popular posts/comments side by side. HN already gives new comments a chance by putting them at the top, but they could take it further.

As often as possible. Otherwise the front page is dominated by big media sites like The NY Times, which frankly is about as anti-“Hacker” as it gets.

Posts on the Front Page got there by being voted on when on the "newest" page, there is (almost) no other way of getting there. So everything you see on the Front Page was once taking its chances on getting noted on the "newest" page, and succeeded.

And to answer your question, I always visit "newest", and if there's something there I like, or that I think is informative, useful, or relevant, then I upvote it.

There must be others who do the same, otherwise nothing would reach the Front Page. They may be a minority, though.

Imgur's community once made an experiment: people browsing ‘new’ were to upvote everything at all, to show the frontpage crowd what garbage they deal with. It sorta worked in that regard, but actually stuff that was upvoted to the very top turned out to be most delightfully wacky, more so than I've seen on the web in years, before or since. That night was the best time Imgur has delivered, for me. A part of it is that on Imgur, you mostly only glance at pics for a second to get the crux and move on (at least before all the videos). Not wade through a text for ten minutes.

They also had (maybe still do?) the phenomenon of ‘late night Imgur’: when most US normies are off to sleep, only weirdos are there, and lots of strange stuff is floating to the front page. Mostly taking some frightening form.

But in fact, ‘new’ on Imgur is an unending stream of complete trash: no-effort meme pics made by teens spiced up with thousand-time reposts. I have no idea how anyone can be browsing that.

I often start with the new page, I enjoy as much the flagged and dead links which can reveal some interesting tangential subjects to HN that piqued my interest :)

Only when I am super addicted to HN and only when I am submitting I am going through the New Tab.

Think the current system is broken and have the feeling that in the early votes is too much bias (either through high karma folks, maybe internal hidden push votes etc from HN internal circles eg. admins, alumina).

Btw very good question and I’d love to see someone from HN giving an official statement plus comment how much HN-internal bias might influence the early votes.

To answer the question, I occasionally browse new and upvote posts. Probably around 30%-40% of my upvotes are from new.

However, my understanding was that newer posts got mixed in to the front page, so posts worthy of upvotes have a chance to receive them. Example: this very post, as of time of me writing this, has only 10 upvotes and was on the front page for me, in between two posts with hundreds of upvotes.

After going through a few pages on the main page (or until I start seeing posts I’ve already seen) then I go to the “new” tab. I read a lot of those and upvote the ones I think should be visible on the front pages. If it’s something that’s really interesting/useful I try to comment so as to give it a bit more visibility. I like to think that most HN users do the same :-)

I use https://github.com/dickmao/nnhackernews as my newsreader, and so my default view is "new". The filtering is the most naive possible (only show brand new submissions or comments for articles you've read). When I wake up, there are 200-300 new submissions on the queue. Of those I might click through on 1-2. The morning ritual takes about 2-3 minutes. In my haste I'm sure I'm skipping some interesting-to-me items.

The holy grail is of course a toutiao filter. Netnews has always been needles-in-haystacks since Usenet. The migration from nntp to http has imo made the problem worse. At least with reddit's subreddit granularizing, one stands a chance of getting read. With HN's monolithic "news" category, it's all pretty random.

To be frank I never visit the new tab, only the home page and I don't bother going to page 2, like the majority of members I believe.

On the other hand, I actively hide threads I'm not interested in, like petty politics or things that have absolutely nothing to do with technology.

I have had friends tell me when they are going to post on new, and upvote. I do tend to look at new when they mention this. I'm sure a large chunk of the stuff that gets on the front page has a similar initial boost.

I do quite often, both because my content addiction requires more than the front page provides and my vanity likes the idea that my comment will be read by a lot of people if the post makes it to the front page.

A couple of times a day I scroll down looking for the interesting things that might be lost, upvoting generously.

Perhaps you could double down and do a HN Poll post to find out?

Update: I'm going to make a point to go through the new page more often and upvote development/programming/comp-sci related articles. I have a feeling a lot of us complaining about that HN front page is containing less-and-less hacking related articles are the same ones that never go through new and upvote stuff :|

I use HN as a link aggregator almost exclusively. My ritual in the morning is to check the "new" tab all the way back to where the links (and their order) start getting familiar. I do this a few more times during the day. Rarely read the comments. Upvote links to math/tech books that I find to be great. For "fun times" I prefer 4chan and youtube.

I browse the "new" tab almost every time I browse HN, every 2-3 days, usually 2-3 pages back. I almost always find some interesting stuff there, some days more so than in the "main" tab. I regularly upvote stuff. Also, like others said, I also browse it right after I submit a new link, but that's because it's shown right after I submit.

You can vote on things? Thanks for letting us know.

Voting cartels. That's the only way anything gets any attention anywhere these days.

Mostly when I submit something myself and then I come back to it during the day. So take a look at my submission list, multiply that by 3, and that's how many votes I gave to the new tab, presumably.

I generally never browse by new and I think these kind of posts tend to attract replies from users who do.

I do. Mostly when I am posting, I will scroll down and read a few of the posts.

Otherwise I will check it maybe once a day.

Every so often when I tell myself I have nothing better to do, like while falling asleep.

I usually read HN every day over breakfast. I only look at the new tab about once a month.

Once every two months I'll vote 3-5 times in 'new'.

Thanks for that, I'll try to remember to do that more often.

Hah, I forgot about it. So here's an upvote to the reminder.

Is there a new tab :P