I started wrote the code for this back in 2010 because I wanted daily summaries to make sure I didn't miss anything good/important; I no longer use them and in fact I tend to forget that they're running at all, but I'm happy to keep the cron jobs in place as long as people find them useful!
I like the ideas of these summaries and curious why they became less used. I myself made a daily summary view which I still use as my primary HN browsing. What I found was that there were more and more mainstreamy submissions filling top spots making it so that the less big but more interesting stories didn't make top lists.
My solution was to allow for a top-50+ daily list. One thing I can immediately see wanting is a single page where I can change the view from weekly/daily and the News/Show/Ask sections as well as vote/comment counts. A deeper top-N list would also need some extra display density.
Curious if you had any other ideas to make this form more effective that wasn't implemented.
I'm trying to solve this by crowd sourcing curation.
Most votes != Weekly news letter worthy
I separated them by making a "deeply important" flag. That flag gets set by efficiently estimating a referendum (elected mods, statical sampling, referendum).
I commend the research. I've also thought about what/how to increase signal/noise and sort-of came to the realization that it's not well defined or solvable for a broad range of interest like HN.
You perhaps have an idea of what "deeply important" might look like. I have a vague idea of what "technically interesting" looks like, and wondered how that could be curated. Perhaps the fastest way to bootstrap a particular sensibility is for one person to manually curate, allowing anyone with similar interests to consume. Eventually some of the top aligned commenters could also curate.
The basic premise of the approach is based on the observation that as an audience grows large, so does the diversity of topics, and unfortunately the quality across the board decreases as signal for one topic is noise for another.
This idea of estimating a referendum (elected mods, statistical sampling, referendum) looks like an approach that could possibly keep on working as numbers grow and keep things 'on topic'. That depends on the mods having more of a say since an actual or accurately estimated referendum will dilute/diversify with growth.
My thoughts on curating for different interests was to imagine 'tags' that could be crowdsourced and each reader could choose a percentage or max number of posts per tag. The first 'dumb thing that could work' that I applied was regexs into sections so all the 'Covid-19' news, etc could be separate from niche stories.
It probably won't be well-received here (although the site made it to the HN front page once IIRC), but for sarcastic/humorous weekly summary of HN, there is n-gate: http://n-gate.com/hackernews/
I’ve been a weekly subscriber for several years now to https://hackernewsletter.com/ run by Kale. He recently added a daily newsletter, if that’s your thing.
Show Hacker News Weekly: https://www.daemonology.net/hn-weekly-show/
Hacker News Weekly: https://www.daemonology.net/hn-weekly/
Hacker News Daily: https://www.daemonology.net/hn-daily/
I started wrote the code for this back in 2010 because I wanted daily summaries to make sure I didn't miss anything good/important; I no longer use them and in fact I tend to forget that they're running at all, but I'm happy to keep the cron jobs in place as long as people find them useful!