HN Explorer

Keeping up with replies to HN comments

10 points by archon810 ↗ HN
I keep finding replies to my past comments, frequently with valuable insight, when I manually check my profile and hit the comments link.

But there's not a notification that a reply has been posted like, say, on reddit or Twitter.

Personally, I'd love email notifications, but at this point, I'd settle for them in the site's UI somewhere.

Or am I missing something and notifications are already available somewhere?

Thanks, HN.

10 comments

[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 36.1 ms ] thread
gardenhedge
It seems to be frequently requested but I hope it never happens tbh
nittanymount
email notifications? got too many emails to read every day, no time to read... maybe it works if filter into a folder, read them once a while, but it is almost the same as the way you are doing
rektide
Recently I've had a weird desire to go try HN over NNTP, the newgroups/usenet protocol. There's no official support, but there's at least one open source app to translate, expose the official API via NNTP. There's a wide variety of NNTP/newsgroup/usenet clients already, so I imagine at least a couple of them would give you watch lists, let you fav or mark threads to help you see replies.

The topic is a bit hard to search for on this site, because we get all kinds of Ask HN's with general newgroups/usenet questions. But I remember their being some options. One I found relatively quickly was https://github.com/gromnitsky/hackernews2nntp . Also ran into https://api.mtr.pub/epilys/nntpserver.py .

krapp
For better or worse, Hacker News is designed around the assumption that as participation in a thread continues, the quality of comments decrease over time, while the likelihood of flamewars and antagonism increases. Thus, not having reply notifications to comments is an intentional quality control feature, suppressing engagement with a thread after the productive phase has likely passed.

It's been requested many many times - it's likely the most frequently requested feature - but the mods are adamant that they feel it would only have a net negative effect on the signal to noise ratio.

There are services that will do this for you, but beyond that, it's up to you to just keep track manually or else ignore anything that drops off your threads page.

rektide
The guidelines[1] clearly call for optimism:

> Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.

They also have other good debate practices:

> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.

I see a lot of doubt & criticality across this site. I continue to feel like skepticism & scorn is broadly, not here but everywhere, cheap & plentiful. There's a kind of mono-mindedness that's convenient, but to dare to enter into the possibility that someone might be right is the mark of a real seeker, a real Hacker. Hackers never get far by assuming their beliefs are right. Anyone whose worked with systems know: the only way to progress is to question everything, repeatedly, to drum up data & examples, again & again. Ask ask ask, explore explore explore.

Anyhow I think you're probably right that the lived experience is very much not as sunny as the guidelines requests; "behind every warning sign is a story"[2]. In this case uncountably many sad stories, of failure to honestly engage, dis-earnest barely masked popularity contents & self-justifications. And perhaps, as you say, not providing tools to keep the conversations going is a bit of a neutron-moderator for the ongoing chain reactions that might perhaps occur.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[2] https://twitter.com/behindeverysign

muzani
I think a lot of us suffer from "Someone on the internet is wrong!" syndrome. Frequently that person is me, but I will stand my ground and argue it until proven wrong.

It's socratic, good way to learn, by questioning everything and letting others question you. But it's not a productive way to spend your days and nights, so I'm happy to let the conversations die after a few days.

logicalmonster
Not intending this to be an insult, but if you're posting so much that you're having difficulty following responses to your comments, you might be posting too many low-effort comments.

Reddit is where a chain of short posts, witty one-liners, or sarcastic comments is the culture: that's a site where you need good notifications if you're an active user. HN is more about insightful comments and nuanced details explained thoughtfully: notifications might be less useful here because the volume of comments from an average user should be much less.

I agree that sometimes notifications on an older post might be useful because some great comment might be forever missed. I guess there's also competing design interests with reducing spam though: if notifications existed the incentive for bad actors to spam users might be significantly increased.