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Ask HN: Wouldn't it be great to be able to follow fellow HN users?
I just spent 15 minutes reading posts and comments by a specific user and really appreciated how detailed and humble they all where.
Each comment almost read like a good blog post so that made me wonder why I cannot follow this user.
I assume there are browser plugins that do this but I would really appreciate if it was a part of HN.
And just like upvoted posts/comments, it should stay private.
- nikivi 6y agoIn theory, one could build a service on top of HN to do this. Each user feed can be read via RSS that HN provides. Maybe this already exists.
- Jugurtha 6y agoHi, you can use hnrss[0] for this. It's easy to add that feed to your mail client, Thunderbird for example, and receive it as new content particular to that user gets created. - [0]: https://hnrss.github.io/#user-feeds https://hnrss.github.io/#user-feeds
- 0-_-0 6y agoYou can also have RSS feeds about replies to your comments [1]. Then you can set your feed reader to send you a desktop notification when you get a reply [2]. [1] https://hnrss.github.io/#reply-feeds https://hnrss.github.io/#reply-feeds [2] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/feedbroreader/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/feedbroreader...
- taytus 6y agoNo.
- kuroguro 6y agoYes! More Twitter features! /s
- suggestionbocks 6y agoI wonder what HN would be like if it was the opposite of Twitter - all comments have to be more than 140 (or 280) characters in length. Does any existing forum do this? Could be interesting if users were only allowed to write mini-essays to each other. Not sure if that would increase the information density by encouraging more thoughtful comments, or decrease it because people would uselessly pad their comments out to hit the threshold.
- Yetanfou 6y agoSlashdot did this - and possibly still does, no idea since I left that site aeons ago - although the limit was lower than 140 characters. It led to people adding random nonsense to their comments to keep the comment filter satisfied. Since everyone knew there was such a content filter and the added guff was marked as such it did not lead to those comments being down-moderated, i.e. all it did was clutter up the site.
- voussoir 6y ago/r/TrueFilm has a 180 minimum for top-level comments in threads except for the weekly casual post. Sometimes people have something to say that doesn't need 180 characters so they'll add padding, but it's pretty rare all things considered.
- puranjay 6y agoNope. I like HN as simple as possible
- scott_s 6y agoI maintain a folder with bookmarks of particular users' comments pages.
- cassepipe 6y agoI think that yes it would be nice but I also fear that the downside is that it may create a fealty effects where followers tend to upvote and back up their "leaders". Twitter already exists, we don't want a another one. I even suspect that it has been thought of and rejected for that very reason. Anyway there are workarounds if you really want that but let's not make it too easy either.
- rtdrury 6y agoYour point is extremely relevant, whether building the ultimate society, or simply meeting immediate needs. Thinking it through, we find that following the leader has trifle benefits but great potential for harm. Thinking it through further, we find following the leader valuable only to help build, and to never degrade, our personal autonomy.
- gambiting 6y agoNo. This is not twitter. This would only make HN worse, as another user just noticed - you'd get the Twitter-like issue of followers upvoting their leaders and downvoting everyone who has ever disagreed with them. If you find someone interesting, just read through their comments history periodically. No subscription needed.
- dijit 6y agoI agree. Also, I’m not stalking you gambiting. We just seem to turn up in the same places already. >.>
- gambiting 6y agoYou see?? The forum works fine, Dijit finds me on every thread without a follow feature anyway :P
- anilakar 6y agoI've always thought of HN as a minimalistic, completely open platform that you can and should customize as you see fit.
- gambiting 6y agoAbsolutely - and as others have pointed out, there are plugins and RSS feeds that allow you to do this should you want to. It's "hacker" news after all, many people here can set this up without much trouble. I'm just against the site itself adding more features(in fact I'd see a few of them removed before I'd advocate adding more).
- spiffytech 6y agoThis phenomenon is why HN shopped showing comment vote counts publicly some years ago. It used to be you would see HN_Favorite_Person with a +X,XXX comment followed by Someone_Disagrees with +32, and that set the tone for what the whole site thought, or thought it should think. There are times I miss public vote counts. While it's nice to assess someone's position just on its merit, it's also useful to factor in how much popular support that opinion has. If I disagree with a position that looks well-endorsed by the community, maybe I should take a second look at the topic and whether my minority position is really correct. Anecdotally, it also feels like HN has much more prolific hard-line extreme sentiments in the years since hiding comment vote counts. People arguing from a position of ideology rather than constructive pursuit of goals. There could be any number of reasons for that, but I'd bet at least a little of it is that now it's harder to look at an extreme opinion and a moderate one and gauge which (if either) represents broader community sentiment. The HN community has seemed to broadly support the removal of vote counts; whatever drawbacks the decision has, consensus appears to be that it's a good move.
- mettamage 6y agoHN is a nice place, because you decide how to use it. You can just add HN users to your bookmarks and follow them from time to time. You could also make a simple Chrome plugin. I've built my own private Chrome plugins, for example, to add to my experience to HN. I keep them private as I find it more respectful. With that said, I use the public Refined Hacker News [1] as well. The fact that HN is conservative on changing its features is what I like about it. If I want a new feature, I'll build it myself. [1] https://github.com/plibither8/refined-hacker-news https://github.com/plibither8/refined-hacker-news
- behnamoh 6y agoHow about when one wants to use mobile instead of desktop? Plugins don't work there anymore. FF has some, but they're limited.
- the_only_law 6y agoI imagine a custom client would be a solution , albeit a bit involved.
- justin66 6y agoA killfile would be a nice feature.
- Scaevolus 6y agowe don't even have an inbox to see comment replies, why would they implement this
- onion2k 6y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=Scaevolus https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=Scaevolus is pretty much exactly that. It doesn't highlight new responses but no one replies after more than a couple of days so it's not really necessary.
- noname120 6y agoThat's a self-fulfilling prophecy. Nobody replies after a few days because there is no inbox for replies (and proportionally very few people use hnreplies[1]). Anyway not having notifications is by design. It gives the opportunity to other commenters to reply, and it reduces heated discussions. [1] https://hnreplies.com https://hnreplies.com
- oxymoran 6y agoNegative.
- germinalphrase 6y agoPass. Keep the social media incentives as minimal as possible. Edit: I did set up a “new response to your comment” email feature that someone posted in the Alan Kay AMA a while back. That’s useful for keeping a discussion going, but I wouldn’t want to see much more.
- robjan 6y agoThis will lead to people posting lower quality comments and one liners to increase their engagement, reach and therefore following. Let's keep it simple. A lot of HN users do have a blog you just need to find it.
- onion2k 6y agoThis will lead to people posting lower quality comments and one liners to increase their engagement, reach and therefore following. No it won't.
- suggestionbocks 6y ago> A lot of HN users do have a blog you just need to find it. That's true, but blogs come and go, whereas HN will be around until the death of the internet.
- quickthrower2 6y agoOnly if like twitter you know the number of followers and have likes for comments etc. But what if you didn’t? I think that would be more like an RSS feed. People don’t blog more because they have one.
- no-dr-onboard 6y agoSorry folks, I'm gonna hard pass on that one. I distinctly remember how this played a role with Mrbabyman on Digg c. 2008 or so.
- suggestionbocks 6y agoI was also thinking about this recently, it could be useful if HN borrowed some features from mainstream social media forums, in terms of community cohesion. For example, being able to award/react to comments like Reddit, Facebook and Slashdot have. Sometimes it's good to just get a feel for what others are thinking of a comment, rather than having to read a comment which either basically repeats what the previous commenter said but with different words, or just disagrees without adding much. I think this would improve the information density of the forum by encouraging substantive comments, and replacing the useless padding comments to mere annotations. (Perhaps this would be a good use of emojis? Keep them blocked from appearing in the comments themselves, but allow them as short annotations to other comments.) Another example, having a comment thread on each user profile, which could have a mix of public or private comments. Sort of like Reddit's messaging, but with a public aspect too. HN currently has no mechanism for direct messaging for some reason, and it seems a glaring omission, considering the community-building advantages this can inspire. This would fill this gap nicely. One more suggestion: being able to add a photograph to your own profile. It's great to talk to other people in cyberspace with text, but sometimes it's also nice to get a visual indicator of who you're communicating with. This doesn't have to be a real life photograph of course, any representative avatar would be fine. I think it would add colour and warmth to interactions on HN. Perhaps to make it more interesting for HN clientele, it could be limited to something like monochrome 256x256 for that old school feeling, or you need to upload a LISP program to generate it. Anyway just some suggestions, would be interested to know other HNers' thoughts.
- nkurz 6y agoYour suggestions are good, but I have to wonder why you are making them under a newly created account. Ironically, several of your suggestions depend on persistent user identity. Why not use one? Or rather, if you have one, why not use it to make these suggestions?
- suggestionbocks 6y agoThanks, well the main reason is that I'm on a different, isolated computer to usual and don't remember my password to my usual account off the top of my head, but still felt a burning desire to comment. Secondary reason is I quite enjoyed the irony of writing all that from a newly created account.
- s9w 6y agoPeople already follow others to downvote. I suggest the opposite: Remove all usernames and points, making it more like 4chan. I think that could be quite valuable.
- pwinnski 6y agoPlease no. We'd be better off hiding usernames by default than this. If you really want to read a user's comments, you obviously can, as you found out yourself. But let that be a manual exercise, or bookmark their page, or whatever. Keep the focus of HN on content, not personalities, please!
- guidovranken 6y agoThere are some users here who frequently share great insights and “binging” their histories has been a delightful experience. I think HN is fine the way it is but if anything I wish I could express my gratitude and encouragement to those users.
- FreshFries 6y agoFor me not. I like the randomness of things I get to see and do not want to make another bubble for myself.
- syats 6y agoThis would incentivize the rock-star attitude, leading to a large number of posts created by people to have followers. This, in turn, will lead to the exclusion of stories and comments from people who don't want to spend time gaining followers. Rock-star is the antithesis of hacker, imho.
- cvhashim 6y agoInteresting idea but we already have twitter and blogs. I really like how simple and boring HN presents itself. If that user who’s providing interesting insight really wanted the attention, they’d go build their brand on those platforms.
- Yetanfou 6y agoNo, it would not be great. It would only add to the already rampant collection of information bubbles created by the producer-follower model used by so many social networking sites. Instead of a producer-follower model I'd like to see a subject-discussant centred model where you "tune in" to a field of interest instead of a single voice. I do not follow any single author nor have I ever done so, instead I rely on search facilities to find things of interest. I use RSS feeds to "follow" publications and discussion sites - like this one - which are authored by a multitude of authors and discussants in part to avoid getting trapped in an information bubble. Instead of an option to follow certain authors there could be an option to follow certain subjects across time, e.g. "free software mobile platforms", "process control systems based on common single-board computers", "decentralisation of internet services", etc. Posts and comments from all authors (no matter their score) can be returned on such a category in chronological order, with links back to their original appearance on the site. Categories could be created through search queries, curated by hand (similar to the way indexes like DMOZ [1] were maintained) or by using ML to track discussion trends. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DMOZ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DMOZ
- NoCanDo 6y agoNo
- vijay_nair 6y agoI have a private HN client that does this and more but I don't want to release it and destroy what we have here. I've gone a step further and removed username display next to comments so I make judgements based solely on the content of the message.
- probinso 6y agoNope
- alquemist 6y agoPlease no. For better of worse, HN is one of the few public outlets not afflicted by celebrity culture.
- loco5niner 6y agoNo thanks, I'd rather not clutter the HN UI. I just use bookmarks periodically.
- ssvss 6y agoYou can use hn.algolia.com, sort it by date, and then search for the usernames that you want to follow like this, "author:username1 author:un2 .. .. .." there is a limit on how many users you can search this way, I have split my list of users into 2 lines, and have those 2 lines pinned in my clipboard history.
- dimeatree 6y agoHaving done the whole circuit and now actively avoiding social media all together, I love this level of anonymity and there is no other place than here where you can discuss as equals without needing to be "someone" or worrying about social-merits.
- ConqueteDuPain 6y agoSlightly off-topic, but is there a way to sort comments by date? Sometimes threads explode with replies. Revisiting the thread several times while the conversation is still active, I find it cumbersome to read through hundreds of the replies again to find the newest ones.
- em-bee 6y agojust go to anyones profile and read their comments. if you like notifications use any tool that updates you on changes of a webpage.
- wh-uws 6y agoSo I recently built a comment notifier for HN https://hacknotescenter.com/ https://hacknotescenter.com/ That I could easily add the feature to allow follows. But it seems like at least in this thread there isn't popular support for the feature. I think I agree it shouldn't be built into HN though
- motohagiography 6y agoParticipating in a community and becoming a public figure I think are different things. Creating followers would turn people into performers instead of participants.
- quickthrower2 6y agoSomeone could or probably had made an external site to provide this. It could even be done as RSS so then you plug in your favourite reader. Would that be sufficient. Why does it need to be part of HN?