It would be nice to correlate this with people who have "Show Dead" turned on, but this is a start. Polls suffer from selection bias, but it might be interesting.
Pick whichever is closest ...
We did a lot of experiments to try and get more people to look at the new page or new content. One was placing one new item at the top of your home page and changing that every couple of minutes. The other was the "rising" sort, which was similar to the hot sort on the front page, but much higher velocity.
None of them really worked all that well. The group of people who read new are a unique breed. :)
It's probably because I have always looked at HN as a sort of amusement or curiosity. The curated listing is part of the entertainment. Not because it usually resonates for me, but because it gives me this glimpse into Otherness. The comments can be more resonant, once in a while.
It's a bit like wandering through the bar district and finding your old haunts missing and replaced with weird facades and fashions. But here and there, you notice some patrons are interjecting with stories eerily similar to the one on the tip of your tongue...
I’ve found some interesting sites from new before they were popular and started subscribing to them. This is the selfish benefit that keeps me going. It also feels good to be the first upvote on something that ends up hitting the front page.
It doesn’t work.
I think it took me between one and two weeks to realize I wasn’t actually clicking the front page.
Not the smartest sheep.
I feel that new is wasted on me because I'm not confident that my own thoughts on what's interesting and worth front page promotion is well... interesting to the community.
From one that only ever opens the main page.
The idea is that with a fixed page size a new submission would get evicted off the first page quicker and would hence suffer a shorter exposure. One way to counteract that is to increase the aperture.
This of course assumes that people would scroll to the bottom and would do that more often than navigating to the next page.
Blog post fully written by AI? Sloppy repo cooked up in a weekend just for the shows? Content ripped and repackaged from another site? Irrelevant content? Notification and content removal, three strikes and the account is banned.
That and maybe a reputation system, like 100 points to be able to start submitting requests, I think it has a high chance to make dang's life easier.
I then use https://oj-hn.com to do all my navigation via keyboard.
So my answer is ‘never’ but I’m working on it. I keep showdead turned on.
Edit - I have been making a big mistake here for a long time. Newest is a heck of a good page and I need to make visiting it into a habit. Thanks for posting this poll; I wouldn’t have remembered that I forgot about a feature without this.
I still comment on main threads out of habit but im probably 10% as active as a decade ago once a top comment gets locked into a thread nothing else matters and there’s no discussion around the edges
All the “AI” debates are played out and boring with basically anyone still excited about anything related to AI treated poorly by people who have basically no expertise in it but mad capitalist automation came for their job