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Ask HN: How do you keep up with replies to your posts/comments?
I've been posting stories and commenting on HN for a while now, and it's frustrating that I never know when someone replies to me.
It looks like there's no built in notification system. No emails, no alerts on the site, no replies page or anything.
So how do you all handle it? Do most people just leave tabs open and refresh them? Or bookmark your own comments and check manually every so often?
We recently found hnreplies.com which works great for replies to comments (it does email and RSS). But it doesn't cover replies to your actual posts. Is there a service that does both? Or do people use something else?
Would be good to hear how you do it. Thanks!
- rolph 7mo agocomments you have made: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=alcazar https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=alcazar postings you have submitted: https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=alcazar https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=alcazar
- alcazar 7mo agoSo you just refresh those pages and notice when someone adds a new comment? That sounds crazy. There must be a better way.
- krapp 7mo agoHacker News is designed under the assumption that the quality of a discussion decreases and the likelihood of arguments/flamewars increases over time, and as the ratio of comments to upvotes increases. If you aren't willing to to put in the effort of checking for responses to your comments, chances are you have nothing of value to contribute. That it takes more effort to do so over time is a feature, not a bug. Just do what most people here do and cease to care about any conversation once if falls off your threads page.
- alcazar 7mo agoWouldn't the people receiving responses to their comments be the ones with value to contribute? If you don't add value, you're likely not getting replies anyway, so this isn't an issue. Thanks for confirming that most people are just refreshing their threads page. I was hoping for a better solution, but it is what it is.
- fragmede 7mo agoSign up to https://www.hnreplies.com/ https://www.hnreplies.com/ or just have AI build your own in whatever shape you want it to be. or use an app like Hack.
- saltyoldman 7mo agoI have on my personal to-do list to build a firefox extension for it.
- alcazar 7mo agoI would use it. If you build it, reply to this comment and hnreplies might tell me about it...
- mmarian 7mo agoI built https://hackernewsalerts.com https://hackernewsalerts.com for that. Think I have about 100 users. It's open source, see links on the site.
- alcazar 7mo agoThanks! I’ve signed up to try it in parallel with hnreplies.com. I like that this one supports post comments as well. FYI, the online tool to test without signing up (https://hackernewsalerts.com/view-comments-replies/ https://hackernewsalerts.com/view-comments-replies/) didn’t work for my username. EDIT: Perhaps that was an apt warning. After signup I received 20 updates for comments that weren't mine. Possibly leaking the usernames of other subscribers to the service.
- vunderba 7mo agoLike many HN users I've got a little bespoke app on my VPS that polls the HackerNews API and looks for responses to any of my comments/posts and then raises a toast notification on my laptop and phone. Honestly, any reasonably modern LLM could probably crank one out for you in 10 minutes. https://github.com/HackerNews/API https://github.com/HackerNews/API
- sph 7mo agoI click the ‘threads’ button in the top bar. 15 years on here, trust me, that’s all you need.
- eimrine 7mo agoYou do not need to know about the replies, but if some topic is important for you - remember you only have 2 weeks of active commenting.