Ask HN: Why doesn't HN alert users in some manner to new replies?
The last thing I found was this Show HN post from 2016 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11080539)
Yes, I think we'll continue to avoid the notification system, not just because of flamewars but also because (relatedly) it's not so compatible with curiosity. Push notifications seem to jack up the nervous system in a way that's good for engagement but not necessarily for users—we all experience this elsewhere on the internet, and on HN we're in the blessed position of not needing to juice the numbers.
“So the most important thing a community site can do is attract the kind of people it wants. A site trying to be as big as possible wants to attract everyone. But a site aiming at a particular subset of users has to attract just those—and just as importantly, repel everyone else. I've made a conscious effort to do this on HN. The graphic design is as plain as possible, and the site rules discourage dramatic link titles. The goal is that the only thing to interest someone arriving at HN for the first time should be the ideas expressed there”
I mean, you only have to read literally any thread on HN's design and features, or any of the nigh-weekly threads complaining about the modern web and its complexity, how commodification and capitalism have ruined its creativity and quirkiness, or how javascript exists, to see those sensibilities are alive and well and strongly culturally correlated to the layout of this site and the perception (somewhat inaccurate) that it exists frozen in amber.
I do think HN should have a simple notification system, with a configurable period of up to, say, a week after posting, and having the ability to mute threads. Just so that you don't miss any initial discussion on new posts, but without feeling overwhelmed or distracted by posts that are no longer news.
On other forums maybe, but I haven't experienced much of that here.
Regardless, this is clearly something _some_ users want, so that we can avoid wasting time manually hunting for new replies. For those who don't, it can be an optional feature and they wouldn't have to use it.
On other forums maybe, but I haven't experienced
much of that here.
Not having notifications is great.
I suspect there is a ton of sophisticated stuff going on behind the scenes, but even if there were, the effect is still too good to complain about.
If it is something important and could be positive, you could always try contacting the poster directly if they have an email on their profile.
I think the requirement that at least two participants need to make some effort to keep the conversation going, is generally an extremely good thing.
For the very rare thread where I hope for a belated reply, I'll keep a tab open and refresh it every day or two until I give up or it expires.
Participants in a subthread might not even look again so default action is no reply. This is a great feature because it allows non-constructive subthreads to fade away with ease. Notifications would change this whole dynamic.
Anything that would generate a notification requiring a swipe-down from the top of the screen, or making a noise, seeing what the notification is and either clicking on it or swiping it away, disable that entirely.
I also allow exactly zero websites to send push notifications via browser on my desktop/laptop workstation systems.
Reply notifications may increase engagement, but I’d argue they reduce the quality of discussion, since such notifications would encourage rapid back and forth arguments.
Look at any post that gets a significant number of comments and then scroll to pick out the deepest threads. When the depth comes from lots of people adding information or opinions, the quality is generally pretty high. When the depth comes from a small number of people going back-and-forth, it’s usually not very interesting.
Adding more of the latter type would make HN worse and that’s what you would get more of if they made HN work more like Reddit.
So your opinion is that discussions are bad.
> When the depth comes from lots of people adding information or opinions, the quality is generally pretty high.
That's not a discussion that’s a lot if people broadcasting into the void (it’s also not true, if lots of people are replying to the same comment they’re usually adding identical or strongly overlapping information on a relatively basic subject).
Ux is hard. Personally, I had clicked the "comments" link and it was not what I was looking for, and then it took a moment of curiosity several years later to try again. I think the moral of the story is, if you want something to be discoverable, don't hide it behind a less obvious naming choice when the more obvious looking choice is used nearby. But who knows.
Threads are part of the HN home page header when logged in.
How does your browsers disable this link? Does it disable other header links as well?
I consider this a feature, not a bug. IMO, it's good to let older conversations just kinda "run out of steam" as attention moves elsewhere. In my experience, extended discussions here tend to be unproductive flame-war level discussion. I don't see any value in making it easier to sustain that.
Like, I "owe" people a response here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30310575#30310784
I am trying to put some degree of effort into the answer, but it feels like they might not even see my responses to their comments.
They thought it'd make a good blog post too, so you can repurpose it for that?
But I have been thinking about making one, maybe this can kick it off. Would have to be anonymous until I successfully make it back into tech.
That tends to happen even when there are notifications in my experience - it only takes one participant to stop.
> In my experience, extended discussions here tend to be unproductive flame-war level discussion.
As in here on HN? That can hardly be due to notifications since there are none. I'm also not looking for extended discussion, just being able to see if someone has something to add to an old comment of mine.
I’ve certainly felt that was happening here a few times. I’m glad the “threads” list is so short, because I’m not immune to the siren call of https://xkcd.com/386 even though my better self wishes I were.
I'm saying notifications would exacerbate those situations, which is why it's good that HN doesn't have that facility.
In my experience, the "hot takes" are often low quality comments. Quality comments take time and thought, and HN isn't conducive for that.
That said, notifications of themselves ... probably aren't that. Though there might be ways to tweak the mechanic to induce this.
Google+ had a Notifications dynamic that seemed to work well in this effect, though it was somewhat specific to how that site was structured:
- Notifications were for specific discussions.
- Disucssions were hosted by a specific user.
- The Notification went out to all (recent-ish) participants in the discussion.
- Discussion hosts could moderate the thread. This was a two-edged sword, but tended to reduce spam and flamebait when used well.
- The Notifications Pane itself wasn't merely a "something happened" nag, but a site element where new comments could be directly responded to.
- Discussion threads were flat, with most-recent comments appearing at the bottom of the thread. I'd at first missed the threaded style, but came to appreciate a flat disucssion which didn't descend into long separated exchanges (frequently flamefests), and for which each subsequent response was an equal contribution to the thread.
- Total thread length was limited to 500 replies.
It's not the same as a topical or open-discussion formum, as with HN. But as a conversation-fostering platform given the right host and participants it could and often did work quite well.
A result was conversations which evolved naturally over days and weeks, sometimes months and years. Conversations didn't simply die.
Perhaps HN could add a /topconversations or /yesterdayconversations link that only highlights the best conversation threads from 24 hours ago. That way attention on good discussions could be maintained for an extra day.
That said, it still won't highlight conversations which have come back to life.
I'm less curious about late replies than I am about late upvotes. Sometimes karma ticks upward and I can't figure out what people liked. It'd be nice to be able to figure this out — does anyone know if any of the browser plugins offer such a functionality?
If I reply to a post or comment that's over several days old there's almost no chance the author will ever see it.
That is a Good Thing.
If you ask a question, and I happen to see it a couple days later and can answer it, why would you not want to see said answer?
Especially considering somebody who's particularly motivated to find delayed answers to specific questions can always bookmark the particular comment and check it manually, or just occasionally scroll-back through the "threads" page or whatever. If they're not motivated enough to do that, then maybe the discussion wasn't that important to begin with.
This is the normal case for commenting :: if someone replies, it shouldn't be difficult to find that out
You can already flag inappropriate content. We don't have to fear it.
If I'm still curious of the answer a few days later I can check my profile a few days later
Basically too inconvenient for a troll, but usable for most probably productive purposes.
Philosophers have been answering, or at least asking, the same questions for centuries and millennia. Technical and scientific questions can span years or decades. Political and social ones, decades and centuries.
No, it's not necessary to drag all of past discourse into each individual conversation. But neither is it reasonable to demand that all discussions die within a few hours, or a day at the outside, on the most perfect text-based global communications platform ever developed.
Move 1:1 conversations to another service. Many people put contact information in their profiles, and others can often be found with a little searching. I've had a few people contact me about HN conversations over email and twitter and it's been a generally positive experience. Maybe HN should do more to encourage people to include contact information in their profiles so that this can happen more often.
An extension to alert for replies to recent comments/submissions could be really easy to make, though. Just check `/threads?id=` every few minutes, compare the content of the previous page snapshot, and collect unique replies into a set.
Incidentally, rather than a custom style sheet to hide the score, I have the entire top bar set to the karma color. This means I cannot see any of the actual links, and I have to really squint at the screen and hunt for them. Long-tail accessibility issues seem part of HN's brand, or something ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I guess I should learn how to build that custom style sheet myself. Unless you can share yours here? ;-)
I later heard from someone else who'd made the list and had somewhat similar responses to it.
HN reduces gamification in most respects, but not all, and even in the ones that remain the psychological impacts are interesting.
Yesterday's Black Bar for example. It's a subtle note, but I immediately knew what it meant (and that there would be inevitable questions about its meaning).
Of course, then there is a question of whether it would encourage more thoughtful comments or not, and I cannot answer that.
That said, I'm not asking for notifications on upvotes (like Stack Overflow does)
I'm asking for the basic functionality of all internet fora I've interacted with for the last close to 30 years that tell you if you have any replies
forum, noun: An Internet message board where users can post messages regarding one or more topics of discussion.
HN is clearly a forum.
Much of the time, it tends to amplify interesting, and diminish nonproductive contributions. Spam, trolling, clickbait, and vacuous responses seem to get quickly downvoted and flagged on HN, which is good. Comment voting has numerous other connotations, however.
- Simple and short expressions tend to be disproportionately upvoted. They're easier to assess. Sometimes they are insightful, most often, only tapping a common sentiment.
- Controversial views tend to be downvoted. Sometimes controversy is flamebait, sometimes it isn't. There's not much distinction made between the two.
- Truth isn't a popularity contest. HN often, but not always, avoids this trap. True expertise in complex topics is rare, but at times necessary. An epistemic system should reflect this to a greater extent (though also be aware of misuses of such claims of expertise or authority).
- Topics strongly shaped by remunerative interests, ideological alignments, and tribal allegiances tend to perform most poorly under popular voting systems. There is a List of Things HN Cannot Discuss, and most of these seem to fall under this umbrella. Dang has voiced frustration with this on occasion, and I've had numerous email discussions with him about this ... more in the past than recently, I think. HN is guided to an extent by its moderator team. It is not directly steered by them. And the overall philosophy is broader than critics of the principle current political tribes seem to admit.
Collaborative filtering / the wisdom of crowds was all the rage in the late 1990s / early 2000s. Whilst it has some uses, there's been an overreliance on it.
I'm not entirely sure how best to patch the system, though I have some thoughts.
- Bounding ratings to a range rather than a simple sum seems more useful.
- Weighting individual's ratings by their own assigned mean similarly. If someone always hands out 5s (on a 1--5 scale), then those are re-scaled to a median score. Rescaling ranges similarly: someone offering only 1s and 5s might see that rescaled to 2 & 4 repectively.
- Factoring in expertise, or rescaling based on other factors such as truth, tone, conciseness, accuracy, references, etc., might help. Goodhart's law applies. But sometimes, what you want isn't the average opinion of the passengers, but a competent pilot.
Another point is that HN doesn't aim simply to be a place where truth is sought, but a conversational platform. Excessive strictness would probably diminish this.
Same, in my profile I ask to upvote if replying to start a discussion. Simple and does the job of catching my attention.
Some in recent memory I can think of:
* prev/next/parent links
* Show HN can now have both a text body and a link (they used to only have a link and you had to submit a reply with your explanation)
That can't be the point. There's no reason to introduce new features with the expectation that no one will ever notice or use them. Honestly, I think this forum cargo-cults its "minimalist" aesthetic far too much.
Honestly... nitpicking comments with some dumb hyper-literal interpretation to find something tiny and pointless to disagree about is an aspect of HN I could do without.
Yes, to the point that people literally never notice them, which is (or should be considered) a problem. People still complain that HN lacks thread folding, even though the feature's been deployed for months. They don't see the links or never bother clicking them. People have been here for years and never noticed the site has a footer with links to other features.
That's not a feature of elegant integration, it's the fault of a purposely obscurant layout.
>Nitpicking comments to find something tiny and pointless to disagree about is an aspect of HN I could do without.
As is the assumption that all criticism of HN and its features is pointless nitpicking. Be less defensive.
how many people complain versus how many complained before the feature was introduced? That some people don't notice a change means not so much.
I certainly notice every time I fat finger these useless links.
That parent one is super useful! Sometimes I go too deep in a discussion and realize I don't want to be there but can't find my way back easily by eyeballing the indent depth of the comments.
Thanks for the lesson!
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30367395
makes me think of this (possibly too glamorous) video of how I imagine HN moderation goes:
I agree that it would be nice for HN to manage this directly.
Works great
It doesn't need extra features if they just read data and do things when stuff changes - you can do that yourself.
I'm sure I "could" do that myself - but why waste my time when it's something so incredibly trivial to add to the site so everyone benefits?
Intentionally breaking the pattern of internet fora by withholding this feature seems ...
Saying that the HN devs are "withholding" a feature implies that you think you're entitled to their development time, QA time, support, etc. You aren't.
As an HN-ish proposal, how about a link on the user page for replies, but only to comments which can't be downvoted (24 hours, for those who might not know)? It could have a number next to it and would surface replies from newest to oldest, but again, only to comments outside of the downvote window.
This would allow some conversations of technical interest to play out days or weeks later, which is of value to users who find hacker news threads sometimes years after the topic was current.
This avoids the dopamine bump of active notifications completely, and prevents tossing gasoline on flamewars, which only rage while the antikarma button is active.
Instead of varied thoughts from many people in replies you’d be much more likely to have the one person arguing their point against replies which is terrible every time I see ot.
It is one of the last and most triumphant remnants of the era of forums.
You log in when you want; you read things you want to read, when you want to read them.
It is not a cult of personality revolving around who replies to what. The idea, the object is centre stage -- and that's the way it should be.
It is not a social network. It is a news aggregator where comments add to, and revolve around, the links submitted and the ideas they represent.
This is a place for exchanging knowledge.
There really aren't many places like HN around, and I treasure it.
Example of an HN text submission where links are clickable: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30345201
I'll sometimes see I got upvoted, and I'll notice it wasn't one of my recent comments (since my recent comments will all be 1 karma).
If the feedback loop between knowing a comment was upvoted is short, sure, that encourages trying to get upvotes (rather than trying to make good discussion). But I think it'd be good to see what old comments I wrote people thought were worth upvoting.
Without such features the same conversations Will need to be repeated again and again as I see you so often here and exactly the same way, but never to progress forward. Much like our society itself.
Hacker news is one of my main sources of information, so it is definitely better than other even worse options. But it is sad that despite my reading over 500 posts a week,
I almost never comment or participate in conversations because the way I consume hacker news is slow. It’s sad and I wish I could affect it, but I can’t because no one will ever read this comment.
I don’t know why I am posting this, just speaking to myself so cathartic perhaps.
Most of the times, I just quietly read the comments and try to converse where it makes sense -- either I'm getting something or giving something in return.
https://hnrss.org/replies?id=greedo
I'm not sure who maintains the site, but it helps me notice replies to my comments. And since I only check it once a day or so, I don't get too involved with flamewars.
A whopping 5 downloads so far. :p
The link is not in the topbar but it's easy to find in your profile.
And no one has (as of 1133 EST 17-Feb-2022) provided a real answer for why HN has such an obvious feature missing :)
No one wants to rethink old decisions made a long time ago and genuinely wonder if things need to change. Hence people come up with bullshit defences.
This kind of reply is exactly the reason I'm glad that HN does not have reply notifications. At least a dozen people have clearly explained that they prefer HN without reply notifications, but you're here offering a troll-ish claim of "no real answer" with a correspondingly sarcastic emoticon.
But no one had (as of when I commented)
so, maybe 8 hours later, if there is no response from OP for a reply made, a notification is sent? OP may choose to ignore of course.
Seriously, you don't have enough interruptions?
If you really want to see if your comments have been replied to, you can see that in the list of your comments.
I was responding to this. That kind of notification won't interrupt me like, say, my phone vibrating or a desktop notification.
I have an agent that watches the RSS feed for replies to my username.[2] Then the huginn agent sends me an email when new replies come in. The beautiful thing is, I can quickly change one setting and throttle down the emails. Only getting an email with a summary of all replies, every X hours, if I want.
PS. Visible karma system is one of the worst things on HN and among many that I don't like. It has no place to be here. At the very least it ought not to be exposed on profiles and comments.
But I do mind that there is no easy way (not even visually!) to track "unread" replies, especially direct replies in older posts.
It does make me wonder how many chances I've missed at stimulating conversation on a topic I was interested, whereas now it just looks like I'm ghosting people.
I wouldn't mind "tagging" for instance (i.e. not all notifications enabled by default, but the ability to be notified when "tagged", e.g. via @username)
News and email clients would highlight new messages you just downloaded. What would be nice is if Hackernews would do something similar. For example, using the e tag header to decide which comments are rendered differently so that it's easy to see that they're new comments since the page was last viewed.
You can just scan down recent threads to see if there are replies.
But it's objectively a missing feature that could be somewhat useful.
However, a related request would be an easy way to identify new comments on a conversation thread when you're on the threads page. Is that something that can be done?
If I have an active day on HN it can be difficult to determine which comments I've read and won't reply to from new comments I'd like to reply to.
There are a lot of changes, just mostly not visible, or only subtly visible. That's on purpose, because (a) users hate design changes and (b) pg-style minimalism is encoded into the DNA and it would be a mistake to mess with that.
I would like an opt-in setting where if I made a top-level comment I get notified if any of the following are true:
- My Comment is upvoted 5 times and I get a Reply. - A Reply to my Comment on it is upvoted 5 times. - I receive more than 3 Replies.
Up/down votes are irrelevant, though, in this context: if I've asked a question, I shouldn't have to go hunting to find out if people replied (or if they've asked something back, etc)
9,000 notifications in 25 days!
Notifications are evil. Or, they can be...
Flo by Moen: I have received nearly 9,000 emails from Flo between January 24th and today, February 17th. Yes, that is an average of 360 emails per for 25 days.
Curious? Read on.
Our insurance company had us install a water leak sensor device made by Moen called "Flo":
https://www.moen.com/search/smart+water
My opinion (and just my opinion) it's a piece of garbage, a waste of time and money.
With that out of the way...
This thing alerts you when it detects various event. It's supposed to be smart? Nah, actually, it's dumb as &*ck.
Example: One of my kids decided a 1.5 hour shower was a good idea. Flo shutoff the water to the entire house at 90 minutes. If this had been a broken pipe in the walls, running for 90 minutes, well, the damage would easily be in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. This is stupid. It protects nothing.
The only scenario where that would have had some value might be if you go on vacation for a week and a water pipe breaks. OK, well, I generally shutoff the water when we go on vacation, so there is no value to this device.
One of the particular notifications has to do with water pressure. Flo sends you an alarm to your phone (via their app) and via email when it exceeds a certain value. We have always had high water pressure. By always I mean, over twenty years. No problems at all. I like this. High water pressure is useful. Flo does not like it.
I probably get no less than ten notifications per day on the app about water pressure. You can snooze them for 24 hours on the app. So, I have to deal with these nonsense notifications every single day. And I can't tell Flo "this is normal, forever, don't bug me".
Email?
As I said at the top, about 360 emails per day, on average, for high water pressure. I now have a collection of nearly 9,000 of these email notifications received during the last 25 days.
Evil.
I said there should be a way to see that you have replies to a submission or comment so you know someone's looking for your response
As for your comment, I understand. I went 11 days before posting the above reply. I was really busy with work. Frankly, I appreciate that HN does not have notifications. Most of what we all discuss in online forums, going back to my days on USENET, isn't important enough to consume the clock cycles. Notifications would just make us waste more time.
Yes, I am calling most of it a waste of time. If I was pressed to pick a number I would say that 1% to 5% might have some value. This might sound harsh. Take it as one person's opinion, which means it has little value and isn't at all relevant to your own context.
They recently tweeted
> In the last 30 days, Hacker News users sent out 337,875 comments, responding to 29,258 users.
Edit: more information in the HN announcement: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26590720
> Symbol’s value as variable is void: t1
Open an issue at https://github.com/dickmao/nnhackernews ?
Every deprived addict, from the grounded Minecraft player to the imprisoned dope fiend, will tell you the deprivation was good for him, but as soon he's given a shot at another fix, he'll instantly take it.
I hate Slack's always-on nature. That I keep using it should tell me how I really feel about it.
If I could guaranteed overpower all my subconscious drives by choice I'd take that opportunity in a heartbeat.
Here is your latest reply RSS feed: https://hnrss.org/replies?id=warrenm
An automated mechanism of getting instant replies would create flame wars much more easily too.
no thanks :)
Objectively, it reduces the opportunity for "discussion" - since you don't know someone is actually having a "discussion" (or trying to have one) with you
Whether that correlates to better or worse "quality" is highly debatable :)
It is highly debatable - that some people happen to think letting conversations die because they can't find when someone is trying to engage them is ... certainly a different way of interacting with the world than is normal