I’m grateful for those who do visit /newest because it’s a cesspit of spam and uninteresting links that, justifiably, never make their way to the home page.

/active, on the other hand, is the real insiders tip. It shows the most active submissions, irrespective of whether they’ve been flagged off the homepage by users who want to avoid “controversial” topics or by an algorithm trying to avoid the same.

You don’t want it to replace the homepage as the arguing will drive you mad over time but it’s worth checking in with to see what conversation is being hidden from you.

https://news.ycombinator.com/active

I've been wondering, why isn't /active in the top nav bar?

It's been under /lists practically since the site started, when /lists was just a dump of interesting rollups 'pg could think of. There's probably less thought put into its placement than you think.

HN is tries (and mostly succeeds) to discourage controversial topics.

Does it? The rules seem to suggest that the intent is to discourage arguments and grandstanding in favor of discussions, and many controversial topics and posts tend to end up as shouting matches in the comments.

I could name 10 widely held societal opinions that would instantly get flagged and likely your account banned if you mention a few times. Very hive mind place here

Indeed, /active, https://hn.algolia.com/ and similar are good to see submissions unfairly flagged off the main page by dishonest groups.

There's also /classic, which only counts votes from user accounts created before a certain cutoff date.

The cutoff used to be early 2008, I believe, but that may have changed in the last ~17 years :)

I've noticed occasionally a new post will show up in my homepage, which I've interpreted as being a randomized injection of new stuff to see if it gets traction. If that's true (and this is all speculation on my part), it's not strictly necessary for anyone to visit /newest.

If you're wondering what those /* urls mean and what else is there: https://news.ycombinator.com/lists

No so thankless: there are many interesting links that never make it to the front page and the only way to find them is browse the first two or three pages of New. It's self rewarding.

Indeed, a few friends have been submitting an important piece on a new open/FOSS platform, but have been unable to get it noticed. It really needs feedback:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46079803

I like /active personally which will show controversial topics.

https://news.ycombinator.com/active

Nice I didn’t know even know about that one, it doesn’t show up in the top bar for me

I asked Gemini to make me HN-reader that show only [flagged]-messages, because when somebody was triggered that much, it must be something interesting.

Found out that they have devious schema to keep those hidden from anonymous visitor. And if you do this on a registered account, they block such perverts right away, said Gemini.

I do visit pretty often along with https://news.ycombinator.com/pool

If we all rely on others to skim /newest, the whole curation system collapses. Maybe the homepage should surface a couple random fresh posts too?

I remember this being discussed a while ago and I proposed a box at the bottom with a few pseudo-random /newest links. Bu someone raised issues with the idea.

It does. That's why if you look at any given point there's random posts on there with like 5 votes mixed in.

This is what worries me. If too many people read these pages the mods might think it undermines the quality of the community and discourse and just remove them. There is only one acceptable way of using HN, and it's in the service of maximizing civil, intellectually curious technical conversation, and suppressing everything else.

I really like https://news.ycombinator.com/best?h=24 with the GET parameter for hours.

If you find a good post on "new" and it doesn't seem to get any traction, then you can e-mail the moderators here and they might put it in their "pool" or "invited" list (forgot which one).

https://news.ycombinator.com/lists

For me, the better HN is https://hckrnews.com/

That's my main way to find interesting links, especially as I usually find comments more interesting than the featured links. I default to the "top 20".

If I wanted a better HN I’d just go to Reddit. I come here precisely because it’s such a midwit place it’s too good to pass up on. Actual insightful tech/science discussions ? Hah, don’t make me laugh.