Just wondering who actually spends the time to go through the (presumably) lower quality "New" tab of Hacker News, finds the good stuff, and upvotes it onto the front page. Seems like a waste of time if "New" has a lot of crap in it. Or are there already pretty high quality links over there?
The actual answer is that insider networks are used to upvote stories. If you don't have a network of people you know on HN to upvote your article, it is very unlikely to ever get seen or noticed. This is a wart of HN that people don't want to talk about. Traffic isn't organic; it's a popularity contest at best. It would be naive to think that people wouldn't game a system that can drive so much traffic to any site.
Well, one advantage of looking at the new page is that you can kick off the discussion for an article. It's kind of fun to have the top-level comment once in a while. It's nothing I seek out, but it's fun when it happens.<p>You can also catch some things that relate to one of your interests, but don't have enough immediate appeal to make it to the front page.
Someone can correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe when multiple people submit the same link, it generates an upvote automatically.<p>So if ten people submit the same story, it gets ten upvotes. For plenty of stories I imagine that eliminates the need to derive upvotes from people browsing "new."
I look at the new tab all the time (right after every time I look at the front page) and I upvote the stuff that gratifies my curiosity and I think will be of value to the community. Hmm, what do I think of this question?
I do. I go through new 1-2x a day, usually the first page or first two pages so that I can "do my part". It's our community thus it's up to us to flag/vote up stories that we would like to see in our community. pg + team have been great at making new better and better w/ less junk.
Me. I usually read the newest page after reading the front page. There’s a lot of crap and I flag the worst. But from time to time I found an interesting story and upvote it, it makes me happy to find them before they disappear, and I’m happier when they later get more upvotes.
A lot of the stuff I see on the front page tends to be simply what is "popular" at the time, not necessarily what is relevant to my interests, I find that the new tab has a more balanced view, in general.
And here I was ready to see an analysis that showed the voter statistics and show some interesting information about it.<p>I monitor the new and ask pages and vote rarely, often just forgetting to vote after I saw the article...
I just check the front page, the first ask page, and the first new page. Usually doesn't take more than 30 seconds if there's nothing good on it.