4 ms·
HN feature request: Watched Users
Being an avid HN user, I have noticed that over time there are certain commenters that I find particularly insightful or interesting to read.
It would be really nice if I could quickly skim a link's comments and spot any comments from these users. On other platforms (Twitter, forums, etc.) avatars make it easy to quickly spot users of interest in a long list. However, HN's text only format works against that.
Ideally there would be a text field on my settings page, "Watched users", which I would populate with a comma separated list of user handles I want to watch.
These users' handles would then appear in a different color in the comments (just like new users currently appear in green).
Writing a browser plugin that does that is trivial, but it would be great for these settings to be tied to my account and persist across devices/browsers/etc.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- alain94040 11y agoActually, here is a variation of this idea that I would find very useful: I'd like to add tags to users based on comments they make. Here's a simple example. Imagine the comment below: olddude: 20 minutes ago I was on the Mac original design team and I remember that .... I'd like to select "was on the Mac original design team", and right-click to tag user "olddude" with that information. Now, everytime I see a comment from oldddude, it would look like: olddude [was on the Mac original design team] 20 minutes ago blah.... This would provide me with context and reinforce the community. Whether those tags would be private to me only, or somehow sharable, how many there could be, is left as an implementation to the reader... If you implement this as a plugin to Chrome or Safari, I'm happy to pay you $100.
- jakobdabo 11y agoTry the hackernews-tagger Firefox add-on at https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/hackernews-tagger/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/hackernews-ta...
- alain94040 11y agoExcellent, thanks. Just wrong browser for me. EDIT: just tried it. It won't let me select a piece of text and automatically find the user who wrote the comment. Instead, I have to select the user first, then type my tag myself. Still, pretty good.
- iDemonix 11y agoEven if this doesn't get added to HN, I'd like to see a plugin for this. If HN was in PHP and open source I'd have it done by tomorrow.
- zhte415 11y agoThis sounds like text annotation, which can be done browser side in JavaScript pretty easily. Just not annotating text, but linking text to a user (and vice versa). Very nice idea.