Surely the HN crowd, with its always so clever folks, has better ways of handling such primitive workflows.
Please share your tips to follow up on your own activity.
Personally, I think people put too much focus on comments. Many are trying to persuade others of a view (and hence are impervious to true discussion). Comments are useful to the extent they provide new information or links directing people to other similar content. I think the limitations on HN comments put the emphasis on the latter purpose and away from the former.
This depends on the content of the comment. Some are more obviously asking for a back-and-forth and some are not. Just because you replied to a comment of the latter type doesn't mean the author is obligated to notice and take the time to give an opinion on what you wrote.
>it's rude to just shout something and then leave
Sure, but how do you define "shout something" and "leave" in this context? Most comments are not tantamount to just "shouting something", and surely there is some threshold of time passing and/or the quality of content where neglecting a reply no longer counts as "leaving".
Leaving comments that thousands of people have to scroll past so you can have a warm feeling that you are being friendly is not beneficial to the group. Please re-think your approach to commenting.
One of the most obnoxious HNisms is when someone makes a comment and then monopolizes every downstream response to defend their position and ego. If you have a good point, then give others a chance to defend the point for you.
Frankly I wouldn’t mind a feature that only lets you post one comment downstream of your other comment.
Of course, you have to be tracking the threads to do that.
You have to learn when you're talking to one of the rare people who are interested in anyone but themselves or anything but their own point of view. As soon as you realize the other party is acting in bad faith, or you feel like there's little chance of further conversation not becoming hostile or just going in pointless circles, just leave.
That is the only way to stay sane here and avoid futile attempts at conversation degenerating into flamewars.
What we don't do is resort to technical tricks to keep that energy buzzed up. We're optimizing for curiosity, not engagement.
(To the author of HN Notify: if you're reading this, thank you!)
There's a neat RSS feed service that I sometimes use also, although my power just went out so I can't dig it up right now. Will try to report back.
For push, set up https://hnreplies.com/ or a similar site. Will only give you replies and not updated karma counts. (edit: and be aware of linking your email and hacker news username if relevant for you)
It provides me with a command-line utility for fetching all of the comments in a particular thread into a SQLite database, for example:
hacker-news-to-sqlite trees hacker-news.db 27897211
(The initial goal of the tool was to archive my own comments, which can be done with "hacker-news-to-sqlite user hacker-news.db your-username" - I run that on a cron)
https://github.com/etcet/HNES/
(There's a downside that it breaks the ‘more’ links on paginated comment pages.)
Weirdly it seems that third-party Android apps for HN haven't bothered with doing anything similar, checking for replies in the background and popping up notifications. That would be pretty much perfect, and isn't really too complicated.
Edit: My bad - you're referring to the "threads" link at the top, not "clicking (individual) threads", right?
To track replies to my own comments, already mentioned https://hnreplies.com/
For keeping up with replies to my own comments, I still just refresh the page, which is a little sad. :P
Seriously though, you get karma by posting stories, balancing what really interests you with what HN looks for in a good story. The more interesting stories you post, the more likely people are to engage with you in comments. Surprising news sometimes makes for a good story, but the most engagement comes from those that either provide an unusually clear illustration of a problem, or would have significant long-term implications if the technology or issue described were to become a norm.
As for keeping track, I just use the Threads link or look at my submissions manually. There is little correlation between how passionately I feel about something at the time of posting and how HN will value it.
Sometimes karma increases due to an old comment, and I'm not sure if someone replied.
https://hnrss.org/replies?id=xcambar
For more options see: https://hnrss.github.io/
I mostly use it when I share one of my own blog posts and there are many sprawling replies/conversations that I want to engage with
HN is beta testing a similar feature. I'd encourage them to add the new comment count as well if they haven't.
IMHO that's not a good thing. I bet you've got more important things to keep tabs on.