Ask HN: What's wrong with adding following users to HN?

2 points·nikivi··6 comments

I would honestly love ability to follow certain user's posts/comments and get one feed generated for it.

I assume HN doesn't have this feature and I wonder why. Is it really that bad?

Also if I assume HN doesn't want to add it. Is it possible to achieve it in some way already? Perhaps generate RSS feeds from users /comments & /posts pages & aggregate into one feed?

View on HN

You click on the username and then submissions, you get all their submissions. Is it what you are looking for?

Yeah but I have to do it per user. I want to generate a feed from users I 'follow'.

I don't think HN provides RSS feeds for /comments /posts of user, can't find it at least. So the only option is to scrape the pages yourself for a given set of users. But that's annoying.

I wonder why HN just doesn't allow to follow users and have a new tab added to top bar with /follows. I can't be alone in wanting this. And it doesn't devalue the simplicity of HN in any way nor hinder the experience imo.

Create a bookmarks folder, add bookmarks of the submission/comment pages of members you enjoy reading.

Issue with that is I don't know when someone posted something. Some users I like post once in a month. It's like if all Twitter users didn't have a feed but constantly checked on users they liked.

>Issue with that is I don't know when someone posted something.

You know when you click on the bookmark. You check the bookmarks at your leisure and read anything new. If there was nothing new, nothing to read.

You can get per-user feeds for HN via hnrss.org. I have been using them for years. You can also get HN feeds there based on other criteria.

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