
Most-favorited Hacker News posts - tlarkworthy
https://observablehq.com/@tomlarkworthy/hacker-favourites-analysis
======
dang
The OP says " _The most favorited articles by the top 10k most active Hacker
News members._ " How was "most active" defined? (Edit: oh I see - the users
who post the most comments:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24352688](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24352688)).
It's an interesting list, and it never occurred to me that by counting the top
favorites of different subsets of users you might get quite different
interesting lists.

I got curious about what the global most-favorited would be. Here are the top
50. The first column is the fave count. It's interesting how many are Ask HNs,
i.e. text posts with no external URL. Sorry that the item ids aren't
clickable:

    
    
      836 19087418 Ask HN: What books changed the way you think about almost everything?
      783 16745042 Ask HN: What are the best MOOCs you've taken?
      685 16775744 Ask HN: How to self-learn electronics?
      581 21332072 Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?
      554 21581361 Ask HN: What's the most valuable thing you can learn in an hour?
      510 18588727 Ask HN: What are your “brain hacks” that help you manage everyday situations?
      510 20264911 Ask HN: What do you do with your Raspberry Pi?
      506 22786853 Ask HN: What are your favorite low-coding apps / tools as a developer?
      472 15919115 Machine Learning 101 slidedeck: 2 years of headbanging, so you don't have to
      470 23151144 Ask HN: Mind bending books to read and never be the same as before?
      463 20916749 Questions to ask a company during a job interview
      461 22299180 Ask HN: What are some books where the reader learns by building projects?
      454 23092657 Ask HN: Name one idea that changed your life
      448 23904000 Systems Design for Advanced Beginners
      447 22400375 Mathematics for the Adventurous Self-Learner
      444 23588896 Teach Yourself Computer Science
      441 21585235 Basic Social Skills Guide (2012)
      439 17238135 How to be a Manager – A step-by-step guide to leading a team
      439 22105229 Tricks to start working despite not feeling like it
      432 16493489 Machine Learning Crash Course
      425 24351073 Most favorited Hacker News posts of all time
      422 22310813 Gears
      421 20985875 The boring technology behind a one-person Internet company (2018)
      416 19490573 A guide to difficult conversations
      409 24120275 How to stop procrastinating by using the Fogg Behavior Model
      409 21324768 Ask HN: What's a promising area to work on?
      406 23229241 Linux Productivity Tools (2019) [pdf]
      398 21712194 Ask HN: Best book / resources on leadership, especially for tech teams?
      396 12702651 Ask HN: What is your favorite YouTube channel for developers?
      381 18805624 Algorithms, by Jeff Erickson
      374 21536789 Build Your Own React
      372 18104814 Ask HN: What are the best textbooks in your field of expertise?
      369 23170881 Ask HN: What's your quarantine side project?
      366 22226380 The missing semester of CS education
      365 23053981 Medium-hard SQL interview questions
      364 17163251 The Importance of Deep Work and the 30-Hour Method for Learning a New Skill
      363 22276184 My productivity app for the past 12 years has been a single .txt file
      360 22235279 Ask HN: What Skills to Acquire in 2020?
      360 13660086 Ask HN: What are some books where the reader learns by building one project?
      358 14486657 Ask HN: What language-agnostic programming books should I read?
      358 15602538 Ask HN: Where can I find high-end stock images for a website?
      356 19900955 Ask HN: What overlooked class of tools should a self-taught programmer look into
      356 20044876 Advanced Data Structures (2017)
      355 19264048 Immersive Linear Algebra (2016)
      355 12713056 Ask HN: How to get started with machine learning?
      353 23339830 Tools for Better Thinking
      353 21900498 Ask HN: Best books you read in the past decade?
      352 20254057 Startup idea checklist
      347 17999659 Ask HN: Favorite teachers on YouTube?
      347 23276456 Ask HN: What startup/technology is on your 'to watch' list?

~~~
tlarkworthy
I did normalize by number of favorites too, so each person had 1 vote shared
over all their favorites. The idea that a person who only had one favourite
was a really strong signal for that single link, whereas people who have lots
of favorites are using it differently to what I want to select for.

At some point I had a similar selection of Ask HN dominance. One problem with
my data is I only grabbed the first page of favorite results.

EDIT: SHOOT, you exposed a bug, my parser skips things things without URLs!
Hence I ended up filtering out most of the Ask HN's!

EDIT: Fixed it

Now my list looks a bit more similar to yours but not quite. Currently "Ask
HN: What books changed the way you think about almost everything?", your #1 is
my #50. If I turn off normalization, it goes to #13 on my lists, so that has
quite a significant impact on the rankings.

sidenote: Lol this post is the 20th most favorited article now.

~~~
kohtatsu
I'd actually assume one favourite to be a misclick.

~~~
tlarkworthy
But those would be randomly distributed so it would not affect the top ranks
much.

------
tlarkworthy
The fact that favorites are a hidden feature and hard to use made me think the
quality of the curation signal would be even better. Also the fact the
HackerNews API, Angolia don't expose this feature made it even more
interesting to aggregate.

Hope you like it and as it was a pain gathering the data, I put it in an
observable notebook so hopefully we don't need to gather that dataset again
for a while.

The learning resources were the most useful thing to me. I have seen most of
those links whoosh by me when reading HN, but this list has made me revisit
some of them that were lost to the sands of time. In particular the bash shell
resource [1] is something I have been trying to re-find for ages!

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17057596](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17057596)

~~~
oefrha
When I emailed mods to argue that the 'web' button should be restored[1], I
was told by dang that he was actually considering removing 'hide' and
'favorite' too, because people rarely use those features. (I routinely use
'hide' but hardly ever use 'favorite'.)

Btw, 'favorite' may be lesser-known but it's certainly not hard to use.

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23762479](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23762479)

~~~
echelon
Favorite is one of my most used features. Please don't remove it, dang! :(

I frequently go back to these stories, whereas I don't often care to find
things I upvoted again. If the two features become conflated, I'll probably
stop upvoting so that I can use upvoted stories and posts as a bookmarking
system.

Please keep favorite stories and posts around.

If you're worried about feature utilization, maybe name it "save" for better
discoverability. That's essentially what I use the feature for.

I don't trust or use browser bookmarks much anymore. HN favorites are high
quality bookmarks that work across all my browsers and devices.

~~~
kinleyd
Yes, like you I use favourite routinely. Please don't remove it.

------
owenversteeg
I personally find the comments far more interesting than the stories. Does
anyone know some HN users with interesting favorited comments?

If anyone thinks the list of posts here is very heavy on programming things,
feel free to browse my favorited comments. I have quite the mix of all topics.
The usual disclaimer applies - these are just my HN favorites, I do not
endorse them. Many favorited comments are completely wrong, they are not
medical, legal or financial advice, I am not licensed to sell insurance etc
etc.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/favorites?id=owenversteeg&comme...](https://news.ycombinator.com/favorites?id=owenversteeg&comments=t)

~~~
PopeDotNinja
Is it possible to favorite a comment on HN?

~~~
non-entity
Yes, click the timestamp on the comment and you'll see the full range of
actions.

~~~
reaperducer
_Yes, click the timestamp on the comment and you 'll see the full range of
actions._

Very interesting, after the very active recent discussion about
discoverability in user interfaces.

It's like HN hired someone from the iOS design team to come up with the notion
of "timestamp" = "favorite."

~~~
sosborn
Another way to look at it is that "timestamp" = "permalink", which is a fairly
common pattern (I'm not trying to imply that it is intuitive, just that it is
common). Once you are at the permalink you have a range of options available
to you.

~~~
razster
Same, as a permalink. I'll bookmark the permalink then run it through
archive.org using a simple addons of mine, in case HN goes down I will have an
archive backup.

------
asutekku
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.

~~~
fluffything
I use the mobile app and its horrible. I can't often save comments, i can't
see my comment threads, ...

There are probably many HN features nobody knows about because the UI doesn't
expose them.

~~~
asutekku
Why are you not using the website? It works really well on mobile and loads
almost instantly. I’ve never seen a reason to use app for HN.

~~~
cgriswald
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.

~~~
ludocode
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 :/

------
geerlingguy
I... never knew “favorite” was a feature on hacker news until I read this
post.

Now I see the “favorite” link right above this comment form. I guess I never
even noticed the links on the post page are different than when browsing
stories on the front page. Now I’m noticing there’s also a “hide” link!

~~~
wsc981
I never knew about the favorite “button” as well. I think the “button” might
be more clear if a unicode “heart” was used instead.

~~~
geerlingguy
And elsewhere in this thread, I also discovered you can favorite _comments_
too (by clicking on the timestamp to get to the permalink page for the
comment).

------
danso
I've occasionally looked at the favorites of highly active users (e.g. the
list of karma leaders), and I've rarely found other users to have used the
feature. As for me, I love using it – it has the right amount of friction such
that I only end up using it for things that really are my favorite. I never
look through my own upvote history. But whenever I need to find something that
I remember being great, it's almost always in my favorites list.

~~~
toomuchtodo
My only complaint with the favorite feature is that after favoriting, it takes
you to your favorites page, versus an async request leaving you in place with
the comment or post favorited.

~~~
dang
That's on my list to change. It'll work like voting does.

~~~
danso
That's funny, I always thought it was intentional. Because the slight
inconvenience of the favoriting action definitely makes me more selective in
using it.

I suppose the public nature of the favorites list (as opposed to upvoted list)
will still have that self-filtering effect.

~~~
dang
It was intentional, but the intention was feature discovery. We did it that
way in the hope that people would get to know the favorites page and start
browsing the favorites of others. It doesn't seem to have had that effect;
it's just a pain. I suppose we could put up a confirmation screen first: "Do
you want to add 'foo' to your favorites?" But that might just be a pain too.

There's another discovery issue, which is that not everyone knows that
favorites are public. Publicness was the primary reason we built the feature:
the hope that it would be a new way of finding interesting stories. One can
see that happening in this thread to some extent. Overall, though, I was
disappointed that it didn't have more of this effect, which is why I
considered removing it.

Perhaps we just didn't do enough to promote it. Someone suggested having a
quarterly post about the most-favorited stories. That might be a good way. We
could have different most-favorited lists based on different subsets of users.
We could ask people which accounts have the most interesting favorites. and so
on.

------
gabrielsroka
I wrote some JavaScript and Python tools to search your HN Favorites and
export them to CSV or HTML.

The JavaScript runs in your browser like a browser extension. It scrapes the
HTML and navigates from page to page.

Setup and usage instructions are in the files.

JavaScript:
[https://github.com/gabrielsroka/gabrielsroka.github.io/blob/...](https://github.com/gabrielsroka/gabrielsroka.github.io/blob/master/getHNFavorites.js)

Python:
[https://github.com/gabrielsroka/gabrielsroka.github.io/blob/...](https://github.com/gabrielsroka/gabrielsroka.github.io/blob/master/getHNFavorites.py)

Previous discussion, other tools and more info:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22788236](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22788236)

------
alexmingoia
Why use website-specific favorites instead of browser favorites? Isn’t it
inconvenient to have bookmarks siloed across different websites? My browser
bookmarks work on any website, are synced across devices and backed up
automatically (Safari), and are easily searchable and organized via folders or
tags.

~~~
kohtatsu
I use it as a super-upvote.

I try to only favourite the cream of the crop, in the hopes someone will
stumble into my favourites list and enjoy them.

I mostly favourite comments not submissions though.

~~~
yorwba
> in the hopes someone will stumble into my favourites list and enjoy them.

I did. Thank you!

------
btilly
Interestingly,
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21429740](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21429740)
is both on this list and flagged. Apparently people have very strong and
diametrically opposed opinions on cancel culture, leading to a lot of flagging
and a lot of favoriting of the same article.

------
FillardMillmore
I quite like the favorite feature. I did not know until reading this post
though that you could favorite comments as well - I'll be sure to utilize that
in the future.

Others have mentioned that the favorite feature is of little utility because
they are using other bookmarking software (browser/browser extensions, etc.).
I would say, personally, that I still love the favorite feature on HN because
my typical collection of bookmarks contains a whole variety of things -
history, politics, music, self-help stuff, etc. The stuff I read and favorite
on HN are of an entirely different set of information and curiosity and thus,
I really do find it useful to have them all collected in one convenient
location.

------
CamelCaseName
I was surprised to learn that I _wasn 't_ using the favorite feature!

I primarily browse HN through the Android app "Materialistic", which has a
prominent "save" button at the top of each story.

However, those saved stories (~1.1/week) aren't favorited. Just saved locally.

Could this be part of why the feature seems so rarely used?

------
amai
I think this list is more useful:
[https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...](https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=&sort=byPopularity&type=story)

~~~
codethief
Thanks for the link! I've been looking for such a feature that shows me the
most popular posts within a given timeframe. My thought process was that, as
much as I enjoy discussions on HN, I don't want to spend too much time on it
and, in particular, I want to avoid browsing HN out of FOMO multiple times a
day. Instead I'd rather just schedule half an hour to an hour every week to
have a look at the most popular posts.

~~~
tlarkworthy
There is a best link
[https://news.ycombinator.com/best](https://news.ycombinator.com/best)

------
njsubedi
I don’t fav any posts that I like, but upvote them. I also up upvote the ones
I want to bookmark, so that I can later come back to read more comments. I
don’t really understand why I would need to fav a post.

------
jacquesm
Of course now _this_ post will become the most favorited HN post of all time.
I certainly marked it and reminded myself to use that feature more often.

------
lifeisstillgood
It might be embarrassing to admit but I use 'threads' as my bookmark service -
if something was engaging/striking/funny enough for me to comment on, then I
want to come back to it.

At some point I will write a thingy to go grab all my old comments but for now
HN is more useful to me than pocket / delicious etc.

It turns out to be a useful heuristic - the mental process that says "I should
store that for later" fails far more often than "that is something I have
something vaguely useful to say about".

------
dgfitz
I find it amusing that the #19 on this is flagged dead.

------
stormdennis
What's amazed me down the years is where some random user will reveal they are
the developer behind some well known software, or the author of a famous book
etc. Then when you look at their profile you'll see that they've been a member
for years but only have a small amount of karma.

------
sn41
Clicking on the timestamp to get to a comment so that I can favorite it, is
not that intuitive either.

------
gumby
The list will be inherently biased for recency (note that “Ursula LeGuin has
died” is high on the list) simply because there are more people around to
vote.

Doesn’t make the list meaningless, but it may not surface the “best” articles
that might interest _you_.

~~~
dang
I posted the global list here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24355617](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24355617)

------
amelius
I'd like to see collaborative filtering applied to this.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collaborative_filtering](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collaborative_filtering)

~~~
dang
You mean "people who favorited X also favorited Y"? That could be interesting.
Not sure there's enough data.

------
ColanR
Notice that the 19th most favorited post is also flagged. ("Those People We
Tried to Cancel? They’re All Hanging Out Together"). To me, that indicates the
flagging mechanism on hn is broken.

~~~
krapp
Have you actually read that thread? It's a garbage fire.

To me, flagging worked as intended.

~~~
ColanR
Apparently quite a lot of HNers disagree with you, and liked it well enough to
save it. That should be enough to indicate the article is appropriate for hn.

~~~
krapp
And the low quality of discussion it produced and the number of flagged
comments should be enough to indicate that it wasn't. Because people don't
just flag for the article, they flag for the thread as well.

~~~
ColanR
Then the comments should be flagged, not the article. There wasn't anything
wrong with the article, and apparently it was interesting to the hn crowd -
which according to the guidelines is exactly what makes it acceptable.

EDIT: to respond to your edit, there was an entire thread discussing this in
the article discussion. The article should be flagged if there's a problem
with the article, and comments should be flagged if there's a problem with the
comments.

------
snowwrestler
This is cool. I think it would be helpful if the list showed the date of each
post as well. That’s an important signal for me when deciding which links to
explore in a curated list.

------
bbx
Surprised to see my project at the top, considering how old it is. Also
surprised by the very low number of favorites overall; I use that feature
quite often.

------
teleforce
Thanks to the poster and the slidedeck's writer, I have finally convinced and
managed to read the Machine Learning 101 slidedeck [1]. I'd recommend you guys
to read it as well, very informative reading.

[1][https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15919115](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15919115)

------
andreisbc
Wow, I've been lurking HN for years and I had never noticed or used the
"favourite" button before

------
coding123
I just learned a few things about music and synth and CSS because of this.
Also, going to favorite THIS post.

------
bottled_poe
Possible selection bias here - How long has the favourite feature been
available in its current form?

~~~
dang
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12073675](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12073675)

------
saadalem
That is very good, if only a HN-lore exist, there are some links that are
submitted to HN regularly, and every 6 months new people discover them. Great
stories people here like sharing, articles, books, etc.. create a ranked list
of HN folklore and traditions.

------
interrupt_
I use the favorites feature as a kind of "read later" list (which I never do).

------
sbr464
I made this for scraping favorites a while back.
[https://github.com/reactual/hacker-news-favorites-
api](https://github.com/reactual/hacker-news-favorites-api)

------
gorgoiler
_clicks favourite_

Maybe if the favouriteness could be transitive in some way? It could be called
“favouriterank” and we could use it to index the web and surface the best
pages when people search for things they are interested in?

~~~
dang
The original intention of the feature was to try to derive some interesting
signal from collective usage (that's why HN favorites are public) so that's an
interesting suggestion.

~~~
gorgoiler
I confess: I didn’t write it in a particularly serious tone (pfff, “
_favouriterank_ ” indeed — a comparison to the early days of a pre-monetized
google.com) but behind it was a serious idea.

I appreciate the charitable response.

------
andersco
When I saw “favorited” I thought that was referring to what I guess is
“upvoted” - as others have mentioned, I didn’t even realize that was a
feature. Is there a list of most upvoted HN stories of all time?

~~~
plibither8
[https://hn.algolia.com/?q=](https://hn.algolia.com/?q=)

------
wombatmobile
How many HN members are there?

Is any data available on their locations? Demographics?

------
sunil_mohanty
It would be nice to have the feature action on the home page itself.

------
1f60c
Where can you find the list of most active Hacker News users?

~~~
nkurz
It depends on how you define "active", but if you click on the Lists link at
the bottom of this page, and then on Leaders, you find an ordered list of the
users with the most points:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders](https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders).

~~~
hombre_fatal
HN's hall of shame.

------
nicwest
I think it's interesting that out of all the news articles about famous people
that have died, Ursla le Guin is the one that turns up in this list.

------
steelcm
TIL HN has favorite functionality!

------
smnscu
Fools. They could've only "favourited" this post _taps temple_.

------
zachromorp
I will fav this post, so your list will have a chance to be recursively
reachable.

~~~
mudlus
Was just thinking this as I liked it.

------
lithos
It's interesting how few favorites the articles actually have.

~~~
dang
Those numbers are artificially low. If you want to compare the global list
it's at
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24355617](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24355617).

------
whereistimbo
I did use favorite features often for both submission and comments.

------
vishnuharidas
What are the most upvoted HN posts of all time?

~~~
ffpip
[https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...](https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=&sort=byPopularity&type=all)

------
surround
What about most favorited comments?

------
stOneskull
exodus

movement of jah people

------
incrimintal
HN's most hidden feature is if you say anything that doesn't align with the
mainstream liberal consensus you'll be flagged and a mod will reprimand you
for flaimbait.

------
ekianjo
Not very useful since almost no-one uses the favorite function on HN.

~~~
dang
68k users have used the favorite feature, on 1.7M posts. It's not widely used
by HN standards, but that's certainly not "almost no-one".

You can also gauge it by how many people rushed to this thread to post "please
don't remove the feature" when someone mentioned we had thought about removing
it.

~~~
ekianjo
Follow up questions when you want to measure adoption:

\- 68k users out of how many users on HN? This is the metric that really
matters when you want to consider how wide the adoption is.

\- Number of users may not be very easy to evaluate as there's throwaway
accounts, inactive accounts and the like, so ideally you would need to account
for the people who log on at least once every month or something.

\- Among those, you would need to filter those who actually use the feature
regularly vs the ones who just used the feature once and never used it again.
Look like the average is at 25 per user based on the data you provided, but I
am guessing there are users with 100s of favorites so that means there are
people at the end of the tail as well, with just a few, which should not be
counted as "active favorite users".

By the way @dang, is there any hidden function on HN to see some HN related
stats?

