Ask YC: Reading from RSS, keeping track of conversations? | Hacker News Reader

Ask YC: Reading from RSS, keeping track of conversations?

8 pointstruebosko12 comments

I read all of my Hacker News, Reddit, etc from Google Reader, like many people. Lately I've become more interested in the actual discussions going on within the actual news as they are usually pretty interesting

The problem I encountered though is that I can view comments, submit my own, but then going back to dicussions is kind of a hassle since the stories are gone from my feed, unless I explicitly mark them as unread, but that's kind of redundant

What do you guys do in this kind of situation to keep track of discussion? Almost would be sweet if Google Reader had a seperate active discussions/threads kind of deal :)

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I use the star feature in google reader as a "watch" marker for developing discussions / topics of interest.

I often subscribe to the comments feed for the article (if one is available). That results in a lot of comment feeds, but they usually peter out after a few days (and I clean house in terms of RSS subscriptions every once in awhile anyway).

I do this too. I have bloglines to show only updated feeds so it doesn't clutter up my feed list when the conversation goes dormant.

It really bothers me when blog software doesn't support rss feeds for comments on a specific post. It's a great way to increase the likelihood that you're going to have 1-and-done commenters for non-regular visitors to your site.

That's a good idea but the maintenance on that seems deadly. I may try that out though

Edit: Incidentally, Hacker News doesn't have RSS feed on comments, heh

"What do you guys do in this kind of situation to keep track of discussion?"

Actually visit the site.

For a forum, I would see how this would work but in a case like YC, the issue is still there, somewhat :)

co.mments works the least worst of cooment tracking systems I've tried. Co-comment just stopped picking up threads in my experience. Dave Winer uses Disqus on his site, and it seems to wotk well fot what it does, but I don't see the mass adoption it requires to become more than a niche product. Tracking convervasions is -- to my eyes -- a big deed not yet met. More people would have better conversations if commenting were easier to join, track, merge and/or link with other comments and conversations.

Maybe use http://friendfeed.com/ Aggregate all you activity - flickr, youtube, blog etc. and ask you friends to comment there. They'll keep all your entries, not only the onces currently in the RSS feed.

Yup, I use Friendfeed. Funny, I was about to see if I could somehow add the YC RSS Feed to FriendFeed with the ability to display comments within but it's just not there yet. Soon, I bet :)

I sometimes use co.mments.com for blog post conversations. It does not work very well though.

Interesting. Does anybody know of a site (or app) that offers similar functionality but does work well?

Co.comments and Disqus where applicable are good

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