Is this an oversight? It looks like the link to “recent” has disappeared from “Explore”. Only “trending” remains as a non-curated list.
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Hi Fil, no it’s not an oversite. You can still find the “recent” from the “Explore” page by clicking on the “view all” link under the “Trending notebooks” link.
Why, though? I’d argue that by hiding the access to recent notebooks you’re amplifying authors who already have a following outside of Observable and can use these platforms to make their notebooks known (and liked, ergo trending).
Other authors however will have an even harder time to get recognition for their notebooks.
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I am sad about this too. I was super excited a few days / weeks ago when you promoted recent back to a top-level citizen, making it easy again (from a way earlier UI change) to access the recent section without having to scroll and click. I agree with @mootari that this really buries ‘the pulse’ of observable, and in spite of the sometimes ‘noise’ on recent, I really value seeing what people are producing.
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This may be a good opportunity to take a statistical look at the notebooks in “Recent”. I’ve attached a dump of the 1500 most recent entries in this notebook:
Edit: Some stats from the dump:
- 805 unique notebook authors
- Creator and owner are the same account for 1440 notebooks
- 637 notebooks are forks
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Well that is well hidden!
I agree with the others that the recent tab is valuable and should be more prominently displayed. Having said that, I do think one problem with the recent tab itself is the flood of forks, experiments, assignments, and other notebooks that (for whatever reason) are not particularly new or inventive but displace high quality work.
It might very well be that your reason for demoting the recent tab was to promote work of a generally higher quality. If so, then I think a better option would be to make the “Share link” option more prominent and encourage folks to use that as a first option and to “Publish” stuff that one would want to, well, publish. 
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I wholeheartedly agree. E.g., a fairly simple measure could be to present a modal to users if they’re about to publish a fork that doesn’t have any changes. Then there’s Feature request: support "d/" prefix for notebook imports which also hasn’t received any further attention.
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Hi everyone, thanks for the awesome feedback and input on the explorer tab, recent links, and “Share Link” +1 to the share link.
We’ll follow-up with this thread with future updates.
Hi @Fil @mootari @mcmcclur thanks again for the feedback on the link to recent. We have updated the new Explore page to show the “Recent”, Most liked" and “View all” links. !
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May I suggest a minor reordering (until a better solution for “recent” and “most liked” has been found)? Having “view all” in the first position would maintain the reference to “Trending notebooks”:
By the way, should “Staff picks” really be at the top instead of Trending? These three notebooks take up a lot of screen space, but rarely ever change.
I get that they’re a neat visual cue for new visitors, but for regular users they’re just a static blob of content that’s in the way.
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Not to diminish anything that puts recent back in the deck, but i fear listing it under trending suggests these are ‘recent trending’ (there is a page to scroll through the history of trending by week, I think) rather than ‘recent all’.
Why should recent be buried so far under ‘trending’? I like the recently developed and all-too-soon abandoned uniform top nav element, where recent re-appeared and did not require multiple clicks to re-enter. Would love to see it back.
Thanks! The “Learn” tab is also a great addition.
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