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Ask HN: How do people know they're being talked about on HN?
Repeatedly on HN, this will happen. Someone will mention something, like for instance someone says something about a16z, and the next thing Mark Andreessen is commenting back in the thread.
Or someone says "X company is bullshit!" and 5 minutes later you see in the thread, "CEO of X Company here.. We're not bullshit".
Some of these people are famous and I would think, not hanging out staring at HN (in these particular threads no less) all day.
How are they being alerted that their company etc.. is being discussed and able to respond so quickly?
- processing 13y agousing something like http://hnwatcher.com http://hnwatcher.com
- ironmagma 13y agoThere are many ways. Google Alerts, companies' traffic logs seeing many Hacker News referrers (most likely), word of mouth...
- julien421 13y agoGoogle Alert does not seem to work at all for HN
- vezzy-fnord 13y agoSeveral scenarios: 1) They are, in fact, hanging out at HN more than you think. 2) They routinely type their names into the search box, out of curiosity or to gauge their publicity. 3) (unlikely) They're continuing the age-old trend of kibozing (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Parry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Parry), where they write scripts that crawl and grep for certain terms, so that they may respond. I'm not sure how HN handles bots, and if anyone actually does this here.
- jkarneges 13y ago#3 isn't too hard if you use the HNStream API (http://hnstream.com/ http://hnstream.com/)
- julien421 13y agohttp://HNWatcher.com http://HNWatcher.com is a free service we launched to do so ;)
- w1ntermute 13y agoAny plans to expand it to more sites?
- julien421 13y agoPossibly to Reddit. Which service do you have in mind?
- mistermann 13y agoTwitter
- w1ntermute 13y agoI was thinking of Reddit, in fact. It would have to be subreddit-specific though, since the larger subreddits are too noisy.
- canatan01 13y agoNice. Two years ago made something similar to follow HN users on http://www.nou.nl/hn/ http://www.nou.nl/hn/
- 13y ago
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- dan_manges 13y agoSomebody tells them about it. It could be somebody who hangs out on HN that sees it, or somebody at the company that watches web traffic referrals or uses something like HNWatcher that julien421 mentioned.
- samstave 13y agoalso - to get emails when someone replies to you: hnnotify.com