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Why this isn't a built-in HN feature is beyond me. Not necessarily email notifications, but a simple notification system on the site.

I realize we all like the simplicity of the current site, but some QoL improvements wouldn't hurt.

I have seen so many of these built over years, I am not really sure why it's not native, but I think because there needs to be an emphasis on recent articles and not discussions on posts or comments from longer back. Building in a notification system would create weird loops back to the past for discussions instead of new ones (and make moderation harder).

You can click on 'threads' in the header and see the threads you start, its not a perfect notification system but I enjoy it.

It doesn't have to support old threads. From what I've seen discussion usually dies down after a few days, if that, probably because of a lack of such a system. But even if it could be enabled for submissions no older than a week, it would be a great usability improvement over the current manual way of checking for new replies, or these external notification systems.

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