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Ask YC: How do you follow YC threads you enjoy?
Often, I find great stories and comments I enjoy here and plan to return to see more comments, but when I get back to the site -- I completely forget.
Do any of you have a simple technique (or even a script) for keeping an eye on posts you enjoy?
- noodle 18y agoyeah, i vote them up. there's a link in your profile that shows your saved stuff.
- vasudeva 18y agoI usually just wait for the RSS feed to re-announce it later on and remind me, but I like your method better. ;)
- bprater 18y agoAh, cool, I didn't know up-voting plopped them in that area. The downside is that I like to up-vote some posts, but don't necessary want to follow the on-going conversation.
- theantidote 18y agoConcurred. It took me a while to find that saved thing though, it should be more prominent.
- brett 18y agoIt used to be in the menu.
- Frabjous-Dey 18y agoOh, cool. Thanks for pointing that out. I didn't know that was there.
- aston 18y agoI make a post in it, then check on my "threads" page (and my post's parent) every now and then. I'm doing it now, for example.
- noelchurchill 18y agoYep this is what I do too.
- jamesbritt 18y agoSame here. Someone wrote a Web ap that would sort of do this for you, and emit an RSS feed (It think), but it would create an entry for each up or down vote, which was not that useful to me.
- swombat 18y agoI do that too... works fine for me.
- qqq 18y agoleave it open in a tab, refresh later.
- oakmac 18y agoF5
- bd 18y agoOn the related note: how do you keep track of which comments are new since your last visit of the thread? HN/reddit system with comments jumping around based on votes makes it hard just to quickly skim for differences. Could there be a way to highlight not seen items? I found this a big help for information overload on the sites that do it (e.g. Google Reader, Bloglines). However, I couldn't figure out how to do it elegantly (i.e. not needing to keep state on the server for each user) for prioritized threaded comments systems like HN/reddit. For updates of a single page it's easy, you just need to bake timestamps for each item and page creation into HTML/JS and check them against the last page timestamp stored in the cookie. But this system breaks down for multiple pages, as each one would need own cookie entry, otherwise any site visit would mark all new items as read. That's btw MetaFilter's problem with highlighting new comments. Though there it's easier to follow the conversation due to linear nature of comment system. Maybe the solution could be to have some dual way of accessing comments? Like prioritized threaded view for the first view and linear time ordered view for subsequent following?
- parenthesis 18y agoSorry! I was trying to vote you up, but voted you down by mistake instead. Someone else please vote the parent comment up for me.
- transburgh 18y agoI agree about the comment movements but it has been discussed here before. It would be nice to have the option to keep comments the way they are (moving) or to view them based on the time they were left.
- issue9mm 18y agoIf you know which comments on a page are new, then you also know which ones are old. The easy answer is to just gray out the older posts (only remotely challenging because the gray background of the page is about the color I WOULD have suggested for old comment text) -- and just leave the new comments as they are. That allows you to easily skim the page for new content, while still allowing you to see the new posts in context. A Digg-style collapse would also probably work, but for some reason, I see grayed out text more in line with the ycombinator mantra.
- transburgh 18y agoI keep it in Google Reader and just revisit the next time I go through the feed.
- pg 18y agoShould I add some kind of feature for this?
- Shamiq 18y agoYes.
- pg 18y agoLet me rephrase that. Does anyone have any suggestions for features of this type?
- unalone 18y agoPerhaps let users bookmark comment threads, and see what changes have been made by highlighting them a little, or putting a red star next to them?
- dmoney 18y agoYou could tie that to upvoting just like for stories.
- Retric 18y agoI would like the option to get a summery email every 12 to 24 hours that shows which of my comments where responded to. I know you can look through your personal comments, but it's easy to miss someones response and after a few days it seems silly to send a detailed answer which is unlikely to be read.
- soundsop 18y agoWhat about an option on the threads page to order your comments by how recently they've had a reply (by any descendant comment) + associated RSS feed. I usually prefer RSS feeds over emails.
- 18y ago
- Fuca 18y agoreaditlater addon on firefox
- twism 18y agoI built a little app for this... http://ycfeeds.com/feed/comments-on-item?item=396186 http://ycfeeds.com/feed/comments-on-item?item=396186
- vlad 18y agoI upvote articles that I don't have time to read, but want to keep track of. I've been doing this for at least a year, since the /saved?id=vlad feature came out (articles a user upvotes are available via that suffix to the url.)
- rfunduk 18y agoMy technique is super low-tech. In my bookmarks bar, positioned conveniently below the site's favicon, I have a folder which is called "For Later". Into this folder I drop stuff I'll want to come back to at some point. Then (and here's the super part of my super low-tech claim), when I'm done with it I move it to another folder called "x" which I periodically delete and re-create. This works everywhere with no extensions or anything, I use Foxmarks to sync the bookmarks themselves between machines (which you could skip if you only used the one machine), that's it.
- yters 18y agoLet's hear it for low tech. I like it when people are able to chain existing, simple tools; instead of engineering a new kludge.
- deleted 18y ago[deleted]
- catone 18y agoTo be honest, I usually just keep the thread open in a tab for a few hours until things die down. That said, I generally only comment on a handful of threads per week, so that's a manageable system for me. For those of you who participate more, I think that wouldn't work so well.
- danw 18y agoBookmark to instapaper. Come back and read later