4 ms·

Ask HN: Easy way to find all internet comments discussing an article?

Is there a way to easily see all 'internet discussion' of an article? i.e all the reddit comments, hn comments, blogs, niche forums, etc talking about an article? When I read an interesting article/blog post I want to see more discussion about it and I go through tons of google queries to see where the article has been discussed. In particular I'd like to be able to discover new forums/blogs this way.

behnamoh 6y ago
There's an extension on Chrome that tells you if a certain webpage was posted on HN or not. That said, popular posts usually receive hundreds of comments on HN, let alone on other platforms. I have yet to read all the comments in my favorite HN posts; doing the same for Reddit and other forums would definitely be so much time consuming. I guess a good service would be something like TL;DR for comments.
- tittlemansCrest 6y ago
  One of my main motivations is getting a sense of what different communities are saying about a piece of content. The experience can be pretty different based on styles (i.e. amount of memes, how serious tone is, how combative, etc). When posts are really popular I'm usually not trying to read all the comments, but would want to read top comments across different platforms.
ksaj 6y ago
Have you tried Google's operators? For example, searching for: link:www.cnn.com -cnn.com will show you what links to www.cnn.com but isn't itself cnn.com. To search for links to this post, it could look something like: link:https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23179276 -ycombinator.com
- tittlemansCrest 6y ago
  Wow, I've never spent the time to look through all the operators. 'link:' gets me most of the way there. Thank you!
  - ksaj 6y ago
    There are others to help you hone it in. Put mandatory things in quotes or with preceding +. There are also operators for inurl: and also filetype: (or ext:) that I have used often enough when looking for things that come in specific formats. EDIT: I just read one of your other responses. Take a look at adding site: to the google searches. You could only do one site (reddit, hn, slashdot, etc) at a time, but it's still at least an easy way to get specific results.
    - tittlemansCrest 6y ago
      It'd be cool if you could do multiple sites & then save that to an alias or something. Thanks so much for your help!
      - thedevindevops 6y ago
        Something that may interest you: Google Custom Search JSON API 100 free queries/day
- donnanorton 6y ago
  Such a great tip, thanks!
zzo38computer 6y ago
Not all comments are on Reddit, blogs, niche forums, etc, there may also be comments on IRC, Usenet, Unusenet, Gopher, mailing lists, IPFS, Tor hidden services, FidoNet, FTP, and web pages which are not indexed by Google (or other web searches) (for various reasons). And some are HTTP but not HTML, using other file formats such as plain text, PDF, etc.

behnamoh 6y ago

There's an extension on Chrome that tells you if a certain webpage was posted on HN or not. That said, popular posts usually receive hundreds of comments on HN, let alone on other platforms. I have yet to read all the comments in my favorite HN posts; doing the same for Reddit and other forums would definitely be so much time consuming. I guess a good service would be something like TL;DR for comments.

tittlemansCrest 6y ago
One of my main motivations is getting a sense of what different communities are saying about a piece of content. The experience can be pretty different based on styles (i.e. amount of memes, how serious tone is, how combative, etc). When posts are really popular I'm usually not trying to read all the comments, but would want to read top comments across different platforms.

ksaj 6y ago

Have you tried Google's operators? For example, searching for: link:www.cnn.com -cnn.com will show you what links to www.cnn.com but isn't itself cnn.com. To search for links to this post, it could look something like: link:https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23179276 -ycombinator.com

tittlemansCrest 6y ago
Wow, I've never spent the time to look through all the operators. 'link:' gets me most of the way there. Thank you!
- ksaj 6y ago
  There are others to help you hone it in. Put mandatory things in quotes or with preceding +. There are also operators for inurl: and also filetype: (or ext:) that I have used often enough when looking for things that come in specific formats. EDIT: I just read one of your other responses. Take a look at adding site: to the google searches. You could only do one site (reddit, hn, slashdot, etc) at a time, but it's still at least an easy way to get specific results.
  - tittlemansCrest 6y ago
    It'd be cool if you could do multiple sites & then save that to an alias or something. Thanks so much for your help!
    - thedevindevops 6y ago
      Something that may interest you: Google Custom Search JSON API 100 free queries/day
donnanorton 6y ago
Such a great tip, thanks!

zzo38computer 6y ago

Not all comments are on Reddit, blogs, niche forums, etc, there may also be comments on IRC, Usenet, Unusenet, Gopher, mailing lists, IPFS, Tor hidden services, FidoNet, FTP, and web pages which are not indexed by Google (or other web searches) (for various reasons). And some are HTTP but not HTML, using other file formats such as plain text, PDF, etc.