I know this is meta but I have been thinking a lot about how the content that ends up on the front page is less technical than it has been in the past. One reason is because I feel a lot of people are leaving their votes on the table and not voting up new content regularly. Am I wrong in this? What's your mix of time spent reading vs voting?
I spend maybe 30 minutes a day on New and just a minute or two on the Front Page. New is where all the interesting and thoughtful stuff is. The Front Page is pretty dull. I think only one item I voted on ended up on the front page. I'm reading this on New right now. I don't recall on ever voting on the Front Page.
I look at new quite a bit but that's probably because I typically consume HN via a script which opens a text file containing: front page, ask, new, show. The entries are formatted as:<p><pre><code> Entry #. Title
<link to article>
<link to discussion>
</code></pre>
So for example for this page it showed up as:<p><pre><code> 18. Ask HN: How much time do you spend on the New page?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18876390
</code></pre>
This makes it easy for me to quickly consume.
I find the front-page itself to have poor signal-noise ratio. New is much worse. So, I stick to the main page and the "ask" page. I seldom look at the "new" page.
Not much unless I have already caught up earlier in the day, like on weekends. I usually go right to the 'Ask' page as I like reading the discussions in the comments.