4 ms·
Ask YC: Follow users on HN?
Dismissing the potential twitter analogies that will certainly arise, this would be an interesting feature to follow submissions, comments, and threads of one's favorite users.
I'm sure many would be (or probably are manually) following PG and others on the top 100, but it would help create quasi-groups of interest -- say a certain user is consistently submitting articles on a subject of interest --, without filtering the community at large.
Thoughts and comments?
- jauco 18y agohttp://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=wumi http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=wumi replace wumi with pg or rms or whomever.
- wumi 18y agocertainly, but was just considering a favorites or saved of some sort, even if it's internal like my saved subs i've upmodded.
- izaidi 18y agoI started making a simple app that scrapes your (or any other user's) HN activity and turns it into an RSS feed, but I didn't finish it, partly because I don't post here much. Following multiple users is a cool idea that didn't occur to me, though, and RSS would make that sort of thing a cinch, so I might pick it up again.
- alaskamiller 18y agoWe've built this already: http://searchyc.com/user/izaidi?sort=by_date http://searchyc.com/user/izaidi?sort=by_date http://rss.searchyc.com/user/izaidi?sort=by_date http://rss.searchyc.com/user/izaidi?sort=by_date
- izaidi 18y agoOh, neat. I didn't know you'd implemented RSS feeds.
- xirium 18y agoAlso see http://www.ycombinator.search.xirium.com/cgi-bin/search.cgi?p=0&q=-alleyinsider.com+-nytimes.com+-slashdot.org+-techcrunch.com+-valleywag.com http://www.ycombinator.search.xirium.com/cgi-bin/search.cgi?... to exclude items before making a custom RSS feed.
- alaskamiller 18y agoSounds like a buddy list on a web forum/message board. A couple days ago someone wanted to add avatars. Next week maybe we should just replace this whole thing with vBulletin.
- rms 18y agoThere is a law about web sites that allow for social interaction, that over time all social sites approach the fullest functionality of social networking. Anyone have a citation for this law?
- wumi 18y agoi didn't really mention anything about messaging, as in buddy lists, but simply to facilitate action that already happens -- manually following a user of interest to see their latest threads and submissions.
- alaskamiller 18y agoYou should set up a poll.
- epi0Bauqu 18y agoI did not want avatars per se, though they would have probably fulfilled my request. All I was asking for was some pictorial cue to better associate user names with their set of comments. It could be randomly generated. It is a memory thing. That being said, humans have evolved to remember faces at a very intricate and ingrained level, so perhaps faces would be best. In any case, I said "pictures next to user names," not avatars. What I was looking for seemed to get lost in peoples' emotional reactions to digg and other social networking sites, as they are here. Once you know you like submissions/comments of certain users, I think it would nice to be able to follow them more easily than going through each, one by one, manually. I think this could be done very differently than a buddy list, e.g. an RSS feed or the exact same interface filtered with those users or somehow promoting them.
- shaunxcode 18y ago
- Tichy 18y agoAs a fun project, one could mirror hacker news on Twitter...