Wow. A sobering reminder to me that even for a tech-savvy readership, only about ten percent are using RSS. Maybe this warrants another survey on why people don't use RSS.
What's significant or interesting about the ordering of stories on the frontpage?
I still have a link to comments for each story in Google Reader (although I don't get the number of comments). What I gain with Reader is the ability to mark all as read and therefore the ability to see what's new since the last time I checked.
If there was no significance to the frontpage it wouldn't exist. It's doing curating for you, a hint at what stories to look at, and all without becoming yet another ever-growing set of things to catch up on if you don't return for a few days.
"I still have a link to comments for each story in Google Reader (although I don't get the number of comments)"
If you browse comments a lot you end up spending almost all your time outside the reader anyway, so it doesn't seem to help that much. I can see how you want to avoid the frontpage if you check HN often - it just shows you the same stories all the time.
I've thought a lot about this, and RSS doesn't really fit social news, especially comments. So far the best UI I've been able to come up with is hackerstream like I said elsewhere in this thread.
I see. I guess most people are using HN differently than me. I'm mostly interested in the articles themselves and I often come across items that have no upvotes and no comments but are totally what I want to read. I'm only interested in comments if the article itself has caught my eye. So the total number of comments and the group curating of the front page doesn't do much for me.
The ordering on the Front Page takes into account the age and the upvotes. "Good" stories that have been noticed end up on the Front Page. "Bad" stories, and stories that don't get noticed for random reasons, don't.
I click through for comments, and find the front-page ordering pretty awful (people tend to vote up the less technical articles more, probably since there's a lower barrier to entry; also, articles in the same genre as the recent influx of stories about Color/etc., which I couldn't care less about, tend to get voted up a lot). And as someone else mentioned, it doesn't mark stories as read, which is a Big Deal for me.
