search

etcet / HNES

Hacker News Extension Suite
Other
248 stars 71 forks source link

Add page to display top posts of the past week/month/year. #181

Open Ross-Esmond opened 3 years ago

Ross-Esmond commented 3 years ago

Note: My plan is to write this myself, as I'm very aware this is a massive feature to request, but I'd rather not write a feature on a fork of HNES if there's no chance of getting it down-merged.

What? Basically, https://hntrending.com/, though there are other examples. The page would (probably) use the hacker news algolia search API (https://hn.algolia.com/api) to display a list of the highest upvoted posts of the last week/month/year.

The difference, however, is that HNES can make use of the "hide" feature from hacker-news, which all of these separate websites lack.

Why? I don't check hacker news very often, so when I do, I like to catch up on the top posts that I've missed. Often these are the most high-value posts for knowledge and insight. Checking hacker news daily feels like a chore, or like I'm checking social media. Using a Catch-Up page is the most efficient way to leverage the most value out of hacker news.

When combined with the ability to hide posts, a Top-Past page becomes an efficient way to exhaustively scour hacker news so that you never miss a top post. A user could check the Top-Month page every few weeks, and hide posts from the top down either after reading them or finding them uninteresting. When you recheck the page after a couple of weeks, the top posts would be filled with links that are both new, and highly upvoted, so that you will never miss a top-ranked post.

I think I could make the argument that this is the ultimate way to browse a site like hacker-news, if we assume that your goal is to maximize the value of your time spent on the site.

Why HNES? There are many sites that use the Hacker News public API to display top posts in various forms, but none of them that I've found have the hide feature from hacker news. In order to implement this feature, they would need to create their own registration and login, such that they could save a list of hidden posts. (Or store it in the browser, but that's clunky) An extension appears to be the only sane way to go. I could build my own extension, but that's even more work on my part, and I'm a big believer in consolidating open-source efforts. I also think there's a solid argument to be made that this feature is high-value enough to be supported by the HNES. So many hacker news alt sites focus on a Top-Past page. Having one built into hacker-news proper seems like an absolute win.

What I need. How are we feeling? If it works properly, is well written, and matches the style of the existing components, would HNES be interested in down-merging a fork with a Top-Past page? If so, we can discuss the details.

timendum commented 3 years ago

Hi, this feature is now supported by hn itself, see #154

Ross-Esmond commented 3 years ago

That's actually different. It may sound nit picky, but that only shows you one day from a week/month/year ago. I'm interested in a sorted aggregate of the top posts from the last week/month/year.

peroxy commented 2 years ago

Just use https://hckrnews.com/

Ross-Esmond commented 2 years ago

That's just the top ten posts from the day, not the top posts over a period of time. If I'm a month behind I would have to read 300 titles, and I could still miss a good article if it landed on the wrong day.