[jedberg]

Reddit had a term for people who read the new page -- the knights of new. The small group of people who make the site work by traipsing through the sludge that is the new page, finding the gems within.

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. :)

[zamadatix]

Reddit, as I'm sure you know well :D, also had the advantage that non-mega subreddits would often only have a single page of new posts per day to look at. So if you were trolling subreddits direct instead of just the ones you follow (I always hated the combined view) or /r/all then it effectively functioned the same as looking at new.

Anyway, back to the original question: I don't normally follow newest regularly but if I'm on a long flight or something I might get bored and poke around there is anything else there. Often there is something good which never bubbles up.

[asdff]

What percent of the knights of new in 2026 are genuine vs sock puppets designed to seed engagement and get the snowball moving? Probably not a lot, considering most posts on reddit these days seem to come from spam bot accounts that do nothing but post identical links to dozens of subreddits. reddit now allows media accounts to post directly from their own managed accounts, violating the old rules against self promotion.

[natureiskino]

Looking at New makes for an unfiltered experience, and you accept the nonsense that comes with that, on any platform. At that point it's still unaffected by the hivemind consensus.

[ro_bit]

> We did a lot of experiments to try and get more people to look at the new page or new content

Is that what "best" sort is doing when browsing a specific subreddit? Occasionally I'll notice some crappy 1 minute old post on my feed that's out of place and realize the sorting was reset to "best" instead of "hot" instead

[oneeyedpigeon]

You can also just sort by "new" i.e. chronologically.

[jedberg]

Best is best explained here:

https://web.archive.org/web/20091210094533/http://blog.reddi...

It was actually created by the XKCD team, to be better than hot.

However, they may have changed how it works since then.

[SOTGO]

"Best" may include some new posts, I actually haven't checked, but the thing that stands out to me is how old many of the posts are. Ever since Reddit made "best" the default sort on the app I notice that any new subreddit I go to will show me at least some posts from more than two weeks ago. It's really baffling that Reddit seems to think it should be preferred over "hot".

[asdff]

I was going to comment I've never seen this before. Then I went to a subreddit and it hit me that I only use old reddit, which lacks the "best" feature.

I'm not sure why people tolerate the new reddit website. It is so slow, busy, and chock full of ads. When I open it on the phone you are straight up missing a lot of discussion comments, so it is broken too. You click a comment it looks like it has no subcomments under it. You click the permalink opening that comment thread in a new window, and there's still no subcomment under it. Now you prefix old. to the url, now you see the subcomments.

Makes me wonder how much discussion there is that is just not observed at all by a good fraction of the site who browses these same threads. Two universes on the same post.

[jazzypants]

I prefer the new design because the text is readable on my phone, and it has a native dark mode. I don't see any of the ads because I use an ad blocker.

Also, I have no idea what you mean about the comments thing. I can immediately see all comments other than the ones that have been collapsed due to having negative karma.

[asdff]

I don't know how else to describe it beyond what I've already done. Are you sure you are seeing all the comments? Have you tested with a post? I don't use the app fwiw. Only tested with the mobile website and it has been like this for years.

I still use old.reddit.com on the phone. Works fine with pinch and zoom. Super performant too, loads in a fraction of the time which is necessary with mobile connections and spotty coverage. I just saw the native reddit app for ios at least is like 450mb. WTF...

[jazzypants]

I don't use the native apps. They are bloated, disgusting messes. I just messed around with old.reddit and compared it to new reddit for around thirty minutes. I noticed no performance differences, and I noticed no discrepancy in comments. I don't know what to tell you. The only time I see fewer comments is when I use an incognito window, but that's just because it's not logged in.

[kartoffelsaft]

The funny thing is that all the reasons you listed to use the new design... existed before in basically any 3rd party app.

[jazzypants]

I agree, and I previously used a 3rd party app myself (Reddit Is Fun). The sad thing is that I actually completely understand why they shut down the free API access. The AI bot scrapers are absurdly aggressive, and bandwidth isn't free.

[psygn89]

On Reddit I often sort by new for comments (which I know isn't the same as new topics), especially on thoughts over whatever thing I'm looking up. Does Hackernews have that ability or am I being blind?

[semolino]

My read on HN comment sorting is that just like its frontpage, everyone sees the same comment page. New comments are added to the top, and quickly sink below others unless they are engaged with.

This is just a guess tho, as my account can't (yet?) see comment upvote counts.

[Jtsummers]

No accounts (except the actual admins/mods) can see upvote counts on comments. That was a deliberate choice from a long time ago for reasons expressed at the time (by pg, IIRC) that I can't seem to locate now. The site originally made them public, but eventually made them private.

[king_zee]

> The group of people who read new are a unique breed

literally me