[dang]

What would make it better? Making the links work the same way as vote and flag?

I'm a bit disappointed in that feature. The intention was for users to browse others' favorites to find interesting things to read, but I've not seen any indication that it worked out that way.

[weinzierl]

> "What would make it better?"

I'd like if it could be made possible to favorite directly in the thread, very much like the Refined Hacker News extension from the OP does. They have an animated screenshot that shows it very well[1].

Currently you first have to go to the comment (or story) itself (by clicking on the "xx minutes ago" or "xx hours ago" link) then click on "favorite" and finally go back to the thread to continue reading. For comments this adds friction and throws one out of context reading the thread. It is not too bad for stories - adding a story to favorites without having read some comments might not be something to be encouraged anyway.

> "Making the links work the same way as vote and flag?"

For me vote and flag work differently but flag and favorite work the same way. I can vote from a thread but cannot flag and favorite from a thread. I believe making favorite work like vote, in the sense that it can be done from the thread, would be a good thing with little downsides.

A minor improvement would be to not have "flag" and "favorite" links next to each other. On mobile it sometimes happens to me that I accidentally flag when I want to favorite. Given that flagging can be easily undone, this is not a big problem. In my opinion having something harmless like "parent" next to favorite would be better still.

> "The intention was for users to browse others' favorites to find interesting things to read [..]"

I do that and I find it valuable but I have to admit that it is not without problems. When I go through favorite lists I don't know why someone found an item interesting enough to add it. In reality there can be a whole bouquet of reasons, just as an example: For me as an English as a second language speaker, I sometimes add an item just because I find the phrasing interesting or I found a new to me and interesting use of a word. A reader of my list will probably not be aware of that and might draw the wrong conclusions about why I added the item to the list.

[1] https://raw.githubusercontent.com/plibither8/refined-hacker-...

[nkurz]

I agree: it should be a great addition, but it hasn't really been used to advantage. I think the main thing is that it needs some publicity: many people have never even noticed it. I've tried to use it for comments, but it's hard to be diligent if no use of it is ever made.

Another easy thing to do would be to add "Most Favorited" to the "Lists" page. Maybe it would be possible to show the number of favorites that a post or comment, with a reverse link to who has favorited it? Maybe add a notification to the creator of a comment that is favorited?

Possibly instead of just having a link on people's profile page, you could have a rolling list of the their most recent favorites? Or maybe for "person" discovery, you could automatically show who else has else favorited something after you do?

It seems like a good feature to start publicly experimenting with. Announce something, try it out for a week, then post a thread asking people what they think and how it can be improved.

[memexy]

I think adding "Most Favorited" would create a popularity contest and people would start looking for ways to game the system. I don't think favorites should have metrics associated with them because as soon as metrics are introduced people will try to optimize them.

Now that I know comments can be favorited I plan to bookmark comments that include useful reference information on topics I find interesting. Adding counters for how many times the comment was favorited wouldn't really help me with that use case because I doubt anyone else cares about collecting useful references so my favorites would never make it to the "most favorited" list. I personally don't care if I make it to the list or not but I'm certain some people would care and they would go around and start playing a popularity contest instead of looking for ways to favorite information that would be useful to them.

[captn3m0]

The [op] tags are really helpful.

[mahaganapati]

I mostly use it to save things to come back to (bookmark). It would be better if I could favorite from the main thread, rather than going to the individual comment's page to favorite.

[pvg]

That I think is part of it, another is it's not really obvious whether it means 'save it for me' or 'show others I like this (and also save it)'. The latter overlaps with upvoting but then you're in a different kind of bind because you can't show individual votes publicly since you don't show votes. It ends up in a kind of conceptual twilight zone, even if the UI was clearer. A private 'like' and a public 'like' might just be a bit too much.