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.
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.
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.
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.
No worries! I was just clarifying, I know sometimes I don't express myself as transparently as I'd hope. I might have to follow up on that suggestion, I didn't even think about that, I've wanted this feature for so long!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 :/
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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?)
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.
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.
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.
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.
