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Ask HN: Why doesn't HN alert users in some manner to new replies?
The last thing I found was this Show HN post from 2016 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11080539 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11080539)
- WithinReason 5y agoIt's a filter, and it works very well. If you're tech savvy you can figure it out for yourself, if you're not then what are you doing on HN? Here is your latest reply RSS feed: https://hnrss.org/replies?id=warrenm https://hnrss.org/replies?id=warrenm
- pbbbt 5y agoThere are people from different types of technical (or not!) backgrounds in all stages of their careers here. Your litmus test for who is correctly "on HN" seems unnecessarily exclusionary. I'm not sure if you meant it to come across like that.
- WithinReason 5y agoIt probably did come out wrong. The point is that those people need to have enough motivation to stay and put up with the difficulty of using the site. This might seem counter-intuitive, but I'm convinced the quality of discussions can be proportional to the user hostility of the website :). See Reddit, Facebook, etc. An automated mechanism of getting instant replies would create flame wars much more easily too.
- warrenm 5y agoSo ... now I need to use an external tool for something that's intentionally-lacking on the main site? no thanks :)
- WithinReason 5y agoNo problem :) As I said in a parallel reply, people not knowing when they get a response improves the discussion quality here.
- warrenm 5y agoIn your opinion not knowing when a response occurs improves "discussion quality" Objectively, it reduces the opportunity for "discussion" - since you don't know someone is actually having a "discussion" (or trying to have one) with you Whether that correlates to better or worse "quality" is highly debatable :)
- cirrus3 5y agoFrom replies, it seems that most people prefer it that way, so I wouldn't say it is _highly_ debatable. It appears to be different from your preference and that's about all.
- warrenm 5y ago>I wouldn't say it is _highly_ debatable It is highly debatable - that some people happen to think letting conversations die because they can't find when someone is trying to engage them is ... certainly a different way of interacting with the world than is normal
- mettamage 5y agoI feel with HN. If you want specific behavior, program for it. When you're done, preferably don't publish the code, so that it can easily take the extra few requests that you're making ;-)
- golergka 5y agoI did a telegram bot for this at some point, but it ended up very annoying and I just abandoned the project. Code is here if you want it: https://github.com/golergka/hn-comment-bot https://github.com/golergka/hn-comment-bot
- nottorp 5y agoBecause HN is a non profit thing that doesn't make money on "engagement". Seriously, you don't have enough interruptions? If you really want to see if your comments have been replied to, you can see that in the list of your comments.
- klez 5y agoI don't think they're asking for notifications. Even just an icon next to my profile name to indicate someone has responded to a comment would be something. And make it opt-in since a lot of people here seem to be happy with the status quo.
- warrenm 5y agoOr an ability to sort my comments/submissions by most-recent comment/reply
- squeaky-clean 5y agoThis is still a notification, even if it's not using the browser notifications or mobile push notifications.
- klez 5y ago> Seriously, you don't have enough interruptions? I was responding to this. That kind of notification won't interrupt me like, say, my phone vibrating or a desktop notification.
- warrenm 5y agocase in point: I asked this question ~1 hour ago, it's garnered (as of this comment) 78 comments, and yet I had to go hunting for it when I got back to HN
- scythe 5y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=warrenm https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=warrenm The link is not in the topbar but it's easy to find in your profile.
- warrenm 5y agothanks for proving my point: I had to go hunting for this submission just to see if anyone had replied/answered And no one has (as of 1133 EST 17-Feb-2022) provided a real answer for why HN has such an obvious feature missing :)
- pHollda 5y agoIt's the same reason dang needs to manually tell people about 'more' in long threads, or repost previous discussion of the same topic. That was the initial design and no one wants to make new changes because of an absurd idealization of that design. No one wants to rethink old decisions made a long time ago and genuinely wonder if things need to change. Hence people come up with bullshit defences.
- dang 5y ago'more' links for long threads wasn't HN's initial design. It's a performance workaround and therefore bs in its own right. I'm slowly making progress on a reimplementation of Arc, which will hopefully allow this to go away.
- scythe 5y ago>And no one has (as of 1133 EST 17-Feb-2022) provided a real answer for why HN has such an obvious feature missing :) This kind of reply is exactly the reason I'm glad that HN does not have reply notifications. At least a dozen people have clearly explained that they prefer HN without reply notifications, but you're here offering a troll-ish claim of "no real answer" with a correspondingly sarcastic emoticon.
- warning26 5y agoHonestly I’m glad it doesn’t. Reply notifications may increase engagement, but I’d argue they reduce the quality of discussion, since such notifications would encourage rapid back and forth arguments.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- wodenokoto 5y agoI believe this is also the official reason
- masklinn 5y agoIt mostly does the opposite because it means getting replies quickly tapers off. After a few days the odds of keeping up a discussion are low, and older discussions are baiscally locked out forever.
- criddell 5y agoReducing back-and-forth discussions is a feature. Look at any post that gets a significant number of comments and then scroll to pick out the deepest threads. When the depth comes from lots of people adding information or opinions, the quality is generally pretty high. When the depth comes from a small number of people going back-and-forth, it’s usually not very interesting. Adding more of the latter type would make HN worse and that’s what you would get more of if they made HN work more like Reddit.
- masklinn 5y ago> Reducing back-and-forth discussions is a feature. So your opinion is that discussions are bad. > When the depth comes from lots of people adding information or opinions, the quality is generally pretty high. That's not a discussion that’s a lot if people broadcasting into the void (it’s also not true, if lots of people are replying to the same comment they’re usually adding identical or strongly overlapping information on a relatively basic subject).
- fwsgonzo 5y agoI wish it had something like a reply counter. I understand that creating and maintaining a notification system is not ideal. But if there is a counter for the number of replies I've gotten, and the number is larger than yesterday, then I know I have to check my comment history.
- civilized 5y agoI love that they don't change anything. Social media services like Reddit that change things eventually change into shit.
- lolinder 5y agoThey don't change nothing, but they're very careful when they introduce a change. Most are so subtle you wouldn't notice, and that's the point. Some in recent memory I can think of: * prev/next/parent links * Show HN can now have both a text body and a link (they used to only have a link and you had to submit a reply with your explanation)
- krapp 5y ago>Most are so subtle you wouldn't notice, and that's the point. That can't be the point. There's no reason to introduce new features with the expectation that no one will ever notice or use them. Honestly, I think this forum cargo-cults its "minimalist" aesthetic far too much.
- civilized 5y agoObviously GP comment is saying you don't notice because the changes integrate so well into the existing system, not saying it's desirable for users to literally not notice the features. Otherwise the maintainers of HN are morons introducing features that no one will use. Honestly... nitpicking comments with some dumb hyper-literal interpretation to find something tiny and pointless to disagree about is an aspect of HN I could do without.
- krapp 5y ago> Obviously he's saying you don't notice because the changes integrate so well into the existing system. Yes, to the point that people literally never notice them, which is (or should be considered) a problem. People still complain that HN lacks thread folding, even though the feature's been deployed for months. They don't see the links or never bother clicking them. People have been here for years and never noticed the site has a footer with links to other features. That's not a feature of elegant integration, it's the fault of a purposely obscurant layout. >Nitpicking comments to find something tiny and pointless to disagree about is an aspect of HN I could do without. As is the assumption that all criticism of HN and its features is pointless nitpicking. Be less defensive.
- jb1991 5y agothere's this: https://www.hnreplies.com https://www.hnreplies.com I understand it is built by an HN moderator, actually, so somewhat endorsed.
- consumer451 5y agoalso this chrome extension was mentioned 10 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26590720 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26590720
- pvg 5y agothat thing steals your session cookie without much asking or explaining
- consumer451 5y agoOoof, sorry for posting it then. Would delete or edit if I could.
- pvg 5y agoI don't there's anything deliberately evil about it, it just happens to be effectively credentials harvesting - your auth cookie ends up on someone else's server. If they get compromised, all those HN accounts get compromised. Some people might be ok with that risk, if aware of it.
- tptacek 5y agoI believe Dan Gackle is the only public HN moderator, and that this isn't really endorsed.
- jb1991 5y agoand I believe that Dan created the site in question, which is sorta an endorsement of sorts: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27555072 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27555072
- bjelkeman-again 5y agoI just click on the Threads to see what happened to something I wrote. I like that it is minimalist. I think it invites a more considered approach to what I write.
- AndrewDucker 5y agoI get mine from https://hnnotify.xyz/ https://hnnotify.xyz/ - seems to work well. I agree that it would be nice for HN to manage this directly.
- tzs 5y agoOT: how come links in HN text submissions are sometimes clickable and sometimes not? Example of an HN text submission where links are clickable: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30345201 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30345201
- dang 5y agoThe default is not, as explained in the FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html. But we turn them on whenever we see a case that isn't abusive. I don't know of a way to automate that.
- bannedbybros 5y ago
- ravenstine 5y agoIf I see my karma go up, that usually tells me that someone may have replied to something I said. Otherwise, I'm glad there's no alert for new replies. Conversation should be intentional. If I'm gonna be reading what someone said in response to me, I better already have enough motivation to check back and see if someone replied. When I don't check back, it's probably because I've got something more important to focus my attention on, and when I reply to someone I assume there's only a small chance they'll actually see it or reply back. An extension to alert for replies to recent comments/submissions could be really easy to make, though. Just check `/threads?id=` every few minutes, compare the content of the previous page snapshot, and collect unique replies into a set.
- csdvrx 5y ago> If I see my karma go up, that usually tells me that someone may have replied to something I said. Same, in my profile I ask to upvote if replying to start a discussion. Simple and does the job of catching my attention.
- ballenf 5y agoI use a custom style sheet to hide my karma score (except on user profile page where I can go if I'm super curious). It's broke an unhealthy cycle I would subconsciously try to craft the perfect reply and get an addiction-inducing high from some big karma boost. Or big productivity-killing negative response.
- exikyut 5y agoSame here! Down to a T. I actually think the consideration to hide it came from the fact that everyone *else's* votes are hidden. Incidentally, rather than a custom style sheet to hide the score, I have the entire top bar set to the karma color. This means I cannot see any of the actual links, and I have to really squint at the screen and hunt for them. Long-tail accessibility issues seem part of HN's brand, or something ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- ravenstine 5y agoYeah, I can imagine that'd be good for many people. I get no thrill out of my karma. To me it's just a signal that something I said got attention and that I might want to quickly glance at my comments page in case there's an opportunity to engage with someone. The number itself is pretty meaningless and doesn't drive me to HN.
- booleandilemma 5y agoWhy doesn't HN do a lot of things? HN tries to be minimalistic, and a lot of people are happy with that (me included).
- andrew_ 5y agoOne less dopamine hit that I can definitely live without. I also feel it gives people less incentive to craft replies for others and instead comment intelligently (yes, there are many replies which are not that, but I have faith the majority are)
- werber 5y agoThat sounds horrible, I’m usually using hn while working, the last thing I need is another distraction. I like intentionality of the platform
- jimmyvalmer 5y agoAutomatic plug whenever I see this asked: nnhackernews.
- gerikson 5y agoThanks for the tip, I just installed (via MELPA), added it as a secondary select method, and restarted Gnus. I can see the "groups" show up, but when I try to enter them I get > Symbol’s value as variable is void: t1 Open an issue at https://github.com/dickmao/nnhackernews https://github.com/dickmao/nnhackernews ?
- ilaksh 5y agoIts typical that everyone is defending the status quo. I doubt the reason it doesn't have that feature is because they are against it. I think it's just one of those things that adds a significant amount of complexity without a ton of benefit for most people. But I also think if they had several developers working on the site, they would have done it. You can just scan down recent threads to see if there are replies. But it's objectively a missing feature that could be somewhat useful.
- 1123581321 5y agoI could be misremembering but think dang really is against it. He’s a philosophical guy about community management.
- frosted-flakes 5y agoThen why did he make https://www.hnreplies.com/ https://www.hnreplies.com/ ?
- 1123581321 5y agoThat’s Dan Grossman, a community member. dang is Daniel Gackle and runs HN.
- frosted-flakes 5y agoMy mistake. I don't know what caused me to conflate them to begin with.
- mrtranscendence 5y agoThey're both named Dan. Every Dan is a mere simulacrum of the original Meta Dan. Your confusion is thus understandable.
- squeaky-clean 5y ago
- kgwxd 5y agoI used https://hnrss.github.io/ https://hnrss.github.io/ for a while. I worked really well but I eventually realized I didn't want it.
- mxstbr 5y agoI've been using this Chrome extension for a while and it's worked really well for me: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news-notifications/bbkfblhdgiddlkfkipjdhhfoephonoba https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news-notifi... They recently tweeted > In the last 30 days, Hacker News users sent out 337,875 comments, responding to 29,258 users. https://twitter.com/magicbell_io/status/1488441548857561095 https://twitter.com/magicbell_io/status/1488441548857561095
- CyberShadow 5y agoThis extension is closed-source and its code is obfuscated. It also phones home according to the Firefox permissions. I'm not sure I would trust it. Edit: more information in the HN announcement: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26590720 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26590720
- Santosh83 5y agoThis is my biggest beef with HN, along with the presence of up/downvote buttons.
- CyberRabbi 5y agoLong ago dang shared with me that reply chain length is proportional to the tendency to violate the HN comment guidelines. HN is passionate about high quality non-toxic discussion.
- giuliomagnifico 5y agoI’m using HACK app, that send you push notifications for reply: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/hack-for-hacker-news-developer/id1464477788 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/hack-for-hacker-news-developer...
- Brajeshwar 5y agoLike the other comments, I also feel that would be a bad idea. I have seen, like, two of my submissions hitting the home page. I then jump in and start commenting. It is all over the place and I would NOT want any notifications for that frenzy. Most of the times, I just quietly read the comments and try to converse where it makes sense -- either I'm getting something or giving something in return.
- bitlax 5y agoThere's an API. Go nuts.
- phatbyte 5y agoNo thanks.
- jasonladuke0311 5y agoAdd me to the camp that is happy there are no notifications.
- skilled 5y agoI'm pretty sure upvoting a comment is seen as a means to notify someone on HN. Maybe it's only in my head but that's how I see it.
- warrenm 5y agoThere's nothing in the HN UI that I've yet noticed that shows when a comment is upvoted (or downvoted) beyond the fake internet points counter next to my username Up/down votes are irrelevant, though, in this context: if I've asked a question, I shouldn't have to go hunting to find out if people replied (or if they've asked something back, etc)
- skilled 5y agoI don't write so many comments so I can always keep track of everything. Also, HN creates contextual threads for comments, the ones involving you, and I haven't had any bad UX to report so far. The system in its current form works.
- foolinaround 5y agoi think this feature is needed. Often times, an insightful reply to a question is asked (others want to see it too) but the OP just may not have noticed it. so, maybe 8 hours later, if there is no response from OP for a reply made, a notification is sent? OP may choose to ignore of course.
- rgoulter 5y agoI do think "upvoted old comments" would be worth notifying about after some cooling duration. I'll sometimes see I got upvoted, and I'll notice it wasn't one of my recent comments (since my recent comments will all be 1 karma). If the feedback loop between knowing a comment was upvoted is short, sure, that encourages trying to get upvotes (rather than trying to make good discussion). But I think it'd be good to see what old comments I wrote people thought were worth upvoting.
- warrenm 5y agoI don't so much care about something being upvoted (it's all fake internet points anyway), but knowing when someone comments back would be quite valuable
- deepsun 5y agoTry RSS, they have it for replies.
- emptybottle 5y agoIt would change the dynamics of the comment section a lot. Instead of varied thoughts from many people in replies you’d be much more likely to have the one person arguing their point against replies which is terrible every time I see ot.
- pvg 5y agoThis has been addressed by dang before, one representative pastequote from a recent (ish) comment: Yes, I think we'll continue to avoid the notification system, not just because of flamewars but also because (relatedly) it's not so compatible with curiosity. Push notifications seem to jack up the nervous system in a way that's good for engagement but not necessarily for users—we all experience this elsewhere on the internet, and on HN we're in the blessed position of not needing to juice the numbers. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22937472 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22937472
- barbazoo 5y agoI very much appreciate this!
- cft 5y agoUpvoted
- BeefWellington 5y agoA take I agree with. I'm glad I'm not bombarded by dozens of blinking status indicators every time I load up HN to see what's interesting today.
- warrenm 5y agoThat's incredibly disappointing :(
- stronglikedan 5y agoWhy? Most users don't want them. And for those that do, there's https://www.hnreplies.com/ https://www.hnreplies.com/, as well as other options mentioned elsewhere here.
- ziggus 5y agoAgreed. In fact, I'd like to see HN go even further and close discussions after some limit has been reached, whether it's time- or attention-based.
- MeneerFriet 5y agoNot exactly what you're asking but I made a Safari extension (iOS/Mac) to highlights new comments: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/hn-comments/id1602932281 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/hn-comments/id1602932281 A whopping 5 downloads so far. :p
- sbayeta 5y agoI'm not on safari (or Mac), so I can't try it. But what I usually do is collapse the comments I already read, and when I check the thread later, I can distinguish new (or previously unread) comments.
- gandalfian 5y agoAnd how to sort comments by date order so you can easily see what's been posted new since you last read a topic.
- greedo 5y agoYou can use an RSS reader to monitor for replies. The URL would be something like: https://hnrss.org/replies?id=greedo https://hnrss.org/replies?id=greedo I'm not sure who maintains the site, but it helps me notice replies to my comments. And since I only check it once a day or so, I don't get too involved with flamewars.
- onion2k 5y agoOne of the really good things about HN is the Algolia integration so building things like a notifier relatively easy. The structure of the data means you can do a lot. The HTML of the pages is old-school enough that rewriting it with a browser plugin is straightforward too. HN is "hackable" in the classic sense of the word. You can build your own things on top of it. It doesn't need extra features if they just read data and do things when stuff changes - you can do that yourself.
- warrenm 5y ago>You can build your own things on top of it. It doesn't need extra features if they just read data and do things when stuff changes - you can do that yourself. I'm sure I "could" do that myself - but why waste my time when it's something so incredibly trivial to add to the site so everyone benefits? Intentionally breaking the pattern of internet fora by withholding this feature seems ...
- onion2k 5y agoIntentionally breaking the pattern of internet fora by withholding this feature seems Saying that the HN devs are "withholding" a feature implies that you think you're entitled to their development time, QA time, support, etc. You aren't.
- einarvollset 5y agoFor the same reason PG proposed turning HN off “during office hours” several years back
- samatman 5y agoThe only thing I'm personally missing from the current system is a chance to find replies to older comments. As an HN-ish proposal, how about a link on the user page for replies, but only to comments which can't be downvoted (24 hours, for those who might not know)? It could have a number next to it and would surface replies from newest to oldest, but again, only to comments outside of the downvote window. This would allow some conversations of technical interest to play out days or weeks later, which is of value to users who find hacker news threads sometimes years after the topic was current. This avoids the dopamine bump of active notifications completely, and prevents tossing gasoline on flamewars, which only rage while the antikarma button is active.
- jimmyvalmer 5y agoLots of sour grapes rationalizing. Every deprived addict, from the grounded Minecraft player to the imprisoned dope fiend, will tell you the deprivation was good for him, but as soon he's given a shot at another fix, he'll instantly take it. I hate Slack's always-on nature. That I keep using it should tell me how I really feel about it.
- mmastrac 5y agoBoth can be true. We can hate the things that addict us and still be uncontrollably driven to them. If I could guaranteed overpower all my subconscious drives by choice I'd take that opportunity in a heartbeat.
- jimmyvalmer 5y agoYou can hate the guilt, but you can't hate the pleasure -- that wouldn't make any sense.
- u801e 5y agoBeing able to distinguish new replies from existing replies in a comment thread is something that would be useful. On Reddit, you can get that if you're a moderator or have a gold subscription. News and email clients would highlight new messages you just downloaded. What would be nice is if Hackernews would do something similar. For example, using the e tag header to decide which comments are rendered differently so that it's easy to see that they're new comments since the page was last viewed.
- GeorgeTirebiter 5y agoIf alerts were an optional feature of HN, I would use them.
- betwixthewires 5y agoI think its a fantastic UX decision. If you care about a discussion you're having you'll check your replies. Telling you someone replied to you encourages lazy responses.
- mdoms 5y agoHN barely holds together as it is. Despite the simplicity of it the site undergoes frequent outages and performance degradations. Long threads get paged in an absolutely insane way because of performance problems and a fix has been underway for several years according to the stock message dang leaves at the top of such threads.
- pbreit 5y agoBecause it would be a total nightmare.
- warrenm 5y agoWhat makes you think that?
- jlcoff 5y agoBecause I suspect YC minimally maintain HN. Not specifically a bad per-se, but don't expect anything new to happen.
- dang 5y agoI work on the code every day! or at least if I don't, it's a bad day. There are a lot of changes, just mostly not visible, or only subtly visible. That's on purpose, because (a) users hate design changes and (b) pg-style minimalism is encoded into the DNA and it would be a mistake to mess with that.
- wanda 5y agoBecause it is a feature. It is one of the last and most triumphant remnants of the era of forums. You log in when you want; you read things you want to read, when you want to read them. It is not a cult of personality revolving around who replies to what. The idea, the object is centre stage -- and that's the way it should be. It is not a social network. It is a news aggregator where comments add to, and revolve around, the links submitted and the ideas they represent. This is a place for exchanging knowledge. There really aren't many places like HN around, and I treasure it.
- robomartin 5y agoTL;DR: 9,000 notifications in 25 days! Notifications are evil. Or, they can be... Flo by Moen: I have received nearly 9,000 emails from Flo between January 24th and today, February 17th. Yes, that is an average of 360 emails per for 25 days. Curious? Read on. Our insurance company had us install a water leak sensor device made by Moen called "Flo": https://www.moen.com/search/smart+water https://www.moen.com/search/smart+water My opinion (and just my opinion) it's a piece of garbage, a waste of time and money. With that out of the way... This thing alerts you when it detects various event. It's supposed to be smart? Nah, actually, it's dumb as &*ck. Example: One of my kids decided a 1.5 hour shower was a good idea. Flo shutoff the water to the entire house at 90 minutes. If this had been a broken pipe in the walls, running for 90 minutes, well, the damage would easily be in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. This is stupid. It protects nothing. The only scenario where that would have had some value might be if you go on vacation for a week and a water pipe breaks. OK, well, I generally shutoff the water when we go on vacation, so there is no value to this device. One of the particular notifications has to do with water pressure. Flo sends you an alarm to your phone (via their app) and via email when it exceeds a certain value. We have always had high water pressure. By always I mean, over twenty years. No problems at all. I like this. High water pressure is useful. Flo does not like it. I probably get no less than ten notifications per day on the app about water pressure. You can snooze them for 24 hours on the app. So, I have to deal with these nonsense notifications every single day. And I can't tell Flo "this is normal, forever, don't bug me". Email? As I said at the top, about 360 emails per day, on average, for high water pressure. I now have a collection of nearly 9,000 of these email notifications received during the last 25 days. Evil.
- warrenm 5y agoI didn't say you should get 9000 emails in 25 days I said there should be a way to see that you have replies to a submission or comment so you know someone's looking for your response
- robomartin 5y agoThis was not a reply to what you said. It is a real-life example of how evil notification can be. Probably the most extreme example I have ever seen. As for your comment, I understand. I went 11 days before posting the above reply. I was really busy with work. Frankly, I appreciate that HN does not have notifications. Most of what we all discuss in online forums, going back to my days on USENET, isn't important enough to consume the clock cycles. Notifications would just make us waste more time. Yes, I am calling most of it a waste of time. If I was pressed to pick a number I would say that 1% to 5% might have some value. This might sound harsh. Take it as one person's opinion, which means it has little value and isn't at all relevant to your own context.
- ww520 5y agoPlease don’t add notification for replies. It will ruin the site. It will have a lot more garbage replies when people are compelled to reply due to gamification. It will make moderation more difficult. Not worth it.
- smoldesu 5y agoThis has probably already been brought up in this thread, but you can track responses to your replies via the unofficial HN API.
- tpoacher 5y agoI don't mind the absence of notifications per se (in fact I think it's a good thing). But I do mind that there is no easy way (not even visually!) to track "unread" replies, especially direct replies in older posts. It does make me wonder how many chances I've missed at stimulating conversation on a topic I was interested, whereas now it just looks like I'm ghosting people. I wouldn't mind "tagging" for instance (i.e. not all notifications enabled by default, but the ability to be notified when "tagged", e.g. via @username)
- donohoe 5y agoI am not sure I would want this by default. I would like an opt-in setting where if I made a top-level comment I get notified if any of the following are true: - My Comment is upvoted 5 times and I get a Reply. - A Reply to my Comment on it is upvoted 5 times. - I receive more than 3 Replies.
- PStamatiou 5y agoHN had this functionality for a while some 10+ years ago. Our YC startup Notifo had integration for HN reply pushes. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1203104 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1203104
- g42gregory 5y agoI am very grateful that HN does not have alert notifications. It sets it clearly apart from the social networks and positions it as a useful tool to learn information.
- solarmist 5y agoI agree with the reasoning not to have notifications mentioned here. However, a related request would be an easy way to identify new comments on a conversation thread when you're on the threads page. Is that something that can be done? If I have an active day on HN it can be difficult to determine which comments I've read and won't reply to from new comments I'd like to reply to.
- livinglist 5y agoif anyone is interested in being notified when there is new reply, checkout the hacker news app I made recently: (https://github.com/livinglist/Hacki https://github.com/livinglist/Hacki ), you will get in-app notification when there is new reply to your comments or stories.
- kilroy123 5y agoI use and self-host the opensource tool – huginn. [1] I have an agent that watches the RSS feed for replies to my username.[2] Then the huginn agent sends me an email when new replies come in. The beautiful thing is, I can quickly change one setting and throttle down the emails. Only getting an email with a summary of all replies, every X hours, if I want. [1] https://github.com/huginn/huginn https://github.com/huginn/huginn [2] https://hnrss.github.io/ https://hnrss.github.io/
- crossroadsguy 5y agoOne of the few things that I like about HN is that when someone responds to your comment you are not necessarily supposed to reply to that, definitely not the only one. I don't think it is by design, but anyhow it has come to be as such. Sometimes you don't even have to respond, or anyone for that matter. Not having a notification system adds in this. PS. Visible karma system is one of the worst things on HN and among many that I don't like. It has no place to be here. At the very least it ought not to be exposed on profiles and comments.
- everdrive 5y agoThat little bit of a friction makes all the difference. The only people who will see replies are those who are invested in the discussion. (ie, those who will return and refresh the page to see who has added what comments.) Alert replies would simply increase "engagement," and at least broadly we've seen that engagement is good for user addiction, but poor for discourse and site health.
- marojejian 5y agoHacker news is sadly a community where Posts, and conversations die quickly. Without features like notifications no one would ever come back to notice the comments like this. There are other choices that could be made to enable conversations to live on and grow versus flame out and die. Without such features the same conversations Will need to be repeated again and again as I see you so often here and exactly the same way, but never to progress forward. Much like our society itself. Hacker news is one of my main sources of information, so it is definitely better than other even worse options. But it is sad that despite my reading over 500 posts a week, I almost never comment or participate in conversations because the way I consume hacker news is slow. It’s sad and I wish I could affect it, but I can’t because no one will ever read this comment. I don’t know why I am posting this, just speaking to myself so cathartic perhaps.