I never visit the HN homepage. I drink from the firehose (RSS feed) and scan topics, digging in to interesting articles based on the title only. I wish there was a way to see the score for the articles from within the feed and have it update to within a 30 minute window.
One more drinking from the firehose here... just come to the "actual" site to read whatever comments the other readers left. I normally enjoy 49% the articles linked and 51% the opinion of the fellow readers here at HN!
I've got the iGoogle hacker news widget showing top 5 to 10 stories. I've also got multiple other google RSS reader widgets running, one for each topic I have an interest in.
My girlfriend showed me how she was doing it once and I thought it was really quite revolutionary. She's since moved on to using a bunch of iPad RSS reader apps, but I'm stuck in the iGoogle "stone age" I just love it.
All that said, I pretty frequently click through to load the hackernews page though.
I use a firefox plugin that automatically loads the next page of sites like HN automatically as I am scrolling to the bottom, thus making a seamless transition. No issues with that.
Due to the algorithm used, I've tended to find the "More" pages to be a mixed bag. If someone was on the front page a few hours ago, say, it's not necessarily even going to be on the 2nd or 3rd page now. And, often, the 2nd and 3rd pages have items with just 2 or 3 upvotes but that won't ever make it to the front page. So I use http://hackerslide.com/ instead to just skip back a few "front pages" to catch up with what I missed instead.
I also am subscribed to the RSS feed, and scan based on topics. Unfortunately, some titles are just not very informative or well-written. I wish titles were more descriptive.
It never made it to the Front page, but has been close to the top of the second front page, and even after falling off the "New" page it still garnered the occasional vote. That suggested that people either were clicking through, or had marked it as "Read Later" and then did so.
I wondered how many people saw it at all, and hence the question.
Ah, if that's the case, then it never appeared in my RSS feed. I'm not sure how the RSS feed is composed (i.e. which submissions show up in it), but perhaps it's more selective than I'd thought. (I was already getting a hundred links each day!)
Interesting post though: I think there was a similar discussion in Programming Pearls by Jon Bentley (Good book).
One morning I noticed that stories had been coming in at over one per minute for an hour, so that the front two new pages only contained about 30 minutes worth of submissions each. The great majority of them had not been voted on.
The stories are coming in even faster right now, but there seems to be more people checking them out.
RSS subscriber here. While we're on the topic, would it be possible to include the text for text stories in the RSS feed? Currently only the title is shown. I tend to not click on things that don't immediately appear relevant to me. The title is not always descriptive of the content.
