I consume the RSS firehose exclusively, so I guess the answer is "constantly". I have no idea which submissions are highly voted.

Ironically, I use "new" on other sites to bypass their algorithms and see the raw stream. But I've never even had the urge here, nor really remembered it exists.

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 go to newest when I want to check if there is an outage with GitHub or AWS or something

Only when I post, because I’m superstitious that if I don’t upvote new posts no one is gonna upvote mine.

It doesn’t work.

I wonder about the bias in this survey as it goes from newest to the main page.

From one that only ever opens the main page.

If by newest you mean new, then I check it several times a day. It's a nice way of finding interesting content and submissions that will never make it to the Frontpage either because of bad timing or whatever reason.

Where/what is newest? I see a “new” on the top page, is that what is meant?

Usually when I've submitted something myself.

I don’t know if this is the data point you’d like, but I forget that it exists. I forget to such a point that I’m going to check out newest now because it seems like a page I should include every visit here.

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.

Sometimes I want to see what kinds of submissions are dead and one minute old.