Ask HN: How do you keep up with replies to comment threads on HN? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How do you keep up with replies to comment threads on HN?

75 pointscebert58 comments

Hi HN aficionados,

I was wondering if anyone has a good system for keeping track of replies to comments you posted on HN. As far as I am aware, HN doesn’t offer any type of notification mechanism that would include notifications for replies to your comment (it would also be nice to be able to subscribe to all comments for certain posts). The lack of a notification mechanism means you need to manually monitor your comments page and see if there were replies. I was curious if anyone has a good solution to this.

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So there are solutions but understand this was done by design. The HN creators fee that back and forth comments can rapidly degrade into a war or words. This appears to be very true if you look at Reddit.

Initially I hated this, now I love it

This. Embrace the quiet!

Was strange at first to me too but makes a lot of sense and I appreciate HN not consuming more of my time and adversely impacting my mental health because of it.

On HN, there is a good chance that someone else may and will answer a reply to one of your comments. It is good enough for me. I feel like the lack of notification encourages that.

Yep. Same here. I also check the first page of my profile's "comments" page a few minutes after replying something, but that's it. Probably a bad habit. (I just discovered now that the "threads" link on the top also does that, lol).

Recently I've even been considering using a client stylesheet to hide my karma at the top of the page.

Yeah my karma is the first thing I look at involuntarily even though it's not something I want to care about. I feel sad when a comment doesn't get any attention, and an irrational amount of excitement when I get a couple dozen upvotes, even though I know it's largely a factor of timing (ending up near the top of the page) and sharing popular opinions.

This is what I do. Look for karma change, then click comments. It also makes me more conscious about voting since I do want to indicate to the other person that their comment was meaningful. Which I like HN's voting system and lack of displaying numbers next to other users comments. I think a lot of subtle things HN does encourages more engaged discussions and less heated battles.

That sums up my experience as well. I just spent 20 mins trying to make that go away in Safari, I was not able to get Tampermonkey working (possibly due to XSS headers) but Cascadea worked. `#karma { display: none !important; }`

Safari also has a built-in mechanism to achieve this. In Preferences > Advanced > Style sheet, you can pick a custom style sheet file for style overrides.

Feedback feels important to me.

Internally, for me it's nice to make a distinction between when I a writing for others and when I am writing for myself.

If I am writing for myself, which I often do, it's much like my musical busking practice: I am not doing it for the money or attention, but just because it adds a nice public layer where I feel like I should respect at least some social norms. That addition of a lightweight ruleset feels helpful to me: instead of just eliding over the parts of my thoughts that might not make sense to other people, I am forced to at least notate them in some way.

If I am writing for other people, then it's nice to know how something was received; I really am often curious about what others think.

Getting feedback in this fashion has led me to shut up when I have an unpopular opinion, but even that's a really good thing to know.

It has been helpful to see the couple of points where I wasn't sure how my opinions would be taken, and to then either be taken to task for writing unclearly, find a real problem in my own thinking, or to at least have a chance to gather the wrong-headed arguments people may fall into when confronted with some of my thoughts.

And if I am indeed writing for other people and no one is upvoting, than that's good to know as well-- there is literally no point for me to write something for other people which is completely ignored. That's a good indicator about when I am just writing for myself-- which is almost everything I write and then publish as a comment on HN.

So, to answer the OP, I just check my comments and if there is a response in the top couple I may respond back. But if folks are writing replies to my very old comments I, I am not checking those because I'm guessing they are just writing for themselves.

I feel like the feedback from karma is not really good.

Anything matching the opinion of some echo-chamber can get hundreds of points (be it purely factual, opinion or even being devoid of content). Mildly unpopular opinions, aka "hot takes", the cathartic stuff, can also garner a lot more upvotes. However, curious civil discussion or sourced posts clarifying something non-controversial won't get much attention at all. Because it's boring. Maybe that's alright, though.

The only part where I see karma working as feedback is in possible flame wars. Anything controversial will get lots of downvotes. So it accidentally work as a deterrent I guess.

Well, now I had to upvote your post, because I know, that you will feel good about it.

Bad for discussions though.

I've often posted questions, gotten good replies I wanted to follow up on, but didn't realize until weeks later when the thread was stale. I usually take discussions to message boards with basic UX like content notifications.

What I do is, for the few threads where I think it's useful, I keep a browser tab open with only the specific thread I want to watch (click on a comment's timestamp to open only the thread below that comment).

Alternatively, you can use the second menu item "Threads" for an easy overview over all your comment threads including replies to your comments.

This also has the advantage over notifications that you decide when to look at the discussion, instead of waiting for notifications (immediate discussion thread notifications - a great evil of our time).

So like notifications with extra steps?

I can already do that on sites that have basic discussion features, by turning those features off and opening a bunch of tabs.

> So like notifications with extra steps?

I don't understand how you missed the point after I even repeated it in the last paragraph (of just three).

Also, nobody forces or even just asked you to do what others do.

I've definitely benefitted from the slower pacing.

I'm embarrassed to admit the number of times I was about to go off half-cocked because I hadn't taken the time to carefully read a comment and/or to just calm down.

Reddit is pretty much built on argument and war of words. They send you instant alert if someone replies to you via 3 channels and want you to check that reply with constant highlighting of new mesages.

They want you to keep track of your karma and get positive dopamine hit with the upvote alerts.

These sites are like drugs. I am surprised why there is not much talk about this.

For replies to my own comments, I use the "threads" link.

I use https://f5bot.com/ to get an email when one of my projects is mentioned here.

For tracking threads where I want to see every comment, I wrote a little tool called hacker-news-to-sqlite which I can run against a thread ID to populate a SQLite database with all of the replies. Then I can sort by created date descending to see the most recent at the top: https://datasette.io/tools/hacker-news-to-sqlite

Thanks for sharing f5bot, that is a wonderful service to learn about. Exactly what I was looking for!

This is interesting in that it seems it may be possible to download all of my comments from all threads and put into sqlite and then be able to search for old comments without have to go scroll page by page, click more - ctr0f - scroll - more repeat.. going to have to try this!

Why sqlite? just dump on a folder and use "ripgrep", obsidian, vscode.

https://hnreplies.com is built and maintained by @dangrossman and sends you an email every time you get a reply

This is what I use, and honestly it (and other systems like it) is the only thing that allows some conversations to progress if someone doesn't reply for hours or a day, depending on how much I've been commenting. I've had a random reply to a comment of mine that came in a week later yield a useful conversation.

It also means I can just ignore HN for longer periods even if I really want to know if there's been movement in a discussion I've been having. Seeing if there's an email present is less distracting and time consuming than reading through my threads.

Note that's not the same person as dang (Dan Gackle), moderator of HN. I had them confused for a while.

Honestly I try not to. It's better for my mental health just to comment and leave it. I'm not perfect at this but I'm working on it.

Same. Usually just comment and dip out, unless I had asked a question or the thread was pertaining to resourceful information.

Occasionally will check up hours or even days later, but not usually.

When I'm feeling brave, curious, calm, not anxious, and generous with my time, I'll click on "comments". This doesn't happen very often. I try to leave self-contained comments that add to the asynchronous conversation (collection of thoughts around the topic, anyway), understanding that what I submit will be here indefinitely and is searchable. Hacker News is the only digital social media platform I participate in on a regular basis, and even then I try to let some days pass between engagement. My reaction to spending time on Facebook and Twitter and Reddit was anxiety, so I've gone back to mostly reading books to learn from other people, sometimes inspired by HN comments--thank you all!

I appreciate the friction that limits runaway back-and-forth conversations with internet strangers; it promotes in me more consideration of what people are writing here, because I am more free to notice what I'm feeling and decide what to do next.

I don't. In fact to keep some sanity I only login to comment, then log back out. I found myself being too karma obsessive, annoyed if down-voted, etc.

The threads are collapsible in the threads UI, so I keep them collapsed and if there is something with > 1 child comments, I check it out. Probably more than I should, but enough that some time has passed and I can look back at it more objectively.

The serendipity of the site is that I can forget I made a comment and find someone has responded to it later on. A few of mine even blew up into long threads after I had forgotten them, and it was nicer to read the discussion by other people than to be responding to it. The slow/calm design aspect of it helps to refine my writing into something I can look back on without cringing too much. The low-notifications aspect of the site is a very nuanced feature.

My solution is to not bikeshed. Talk about things which are of interest to you and don't dig after what might get you upvotes.

As long as you are polite and don't expose anyone's fragile ego you occasionally have an interesting discussion.

If a thread discussion interests me l, whether or not I respond in it, I bookmark it in a dedicated folder ("THREADS") located in the toolbar of the browser.

3-5 times per week, I use the "open all bookmarks" option by right-clicking the folder and if often results in 5-15 tabs immediately opening.

On each tab, I start by pressing ctrl-F with my nickname to see where I wrote and whether someone engaged.

Often, I'm more interested in what others will contribute to the main topic rather than engaging myself into it, so I intentionally ignore the page for a few days, until I have the impression that the dust settled. Then I read the entire thread.

I can't remotely express how much reading other HN users contributions has helped me in many aspects of my life, I see HN threads as a gold mine of useful information.

Try “threads” next to “new”.

Thanks! It never occurred to me to leverage that, but is closer to what I was looking for.

What else would you even use it for?

For keeping track of replies to my own comments, as previously mentioned there's the threads link at the top of the page, as well as https://hnreplies.com/ and https://hnnotify.xyz/.

You can also use https://hnrss.github.io/ or http://hnapp.com/ to make RSS feeds of various types.

If there's a post that is particularly interesting and you want to be able to keep abreast of new comments in it, I've found the HN Comments Owl[0] browser extension particularly useful for this. I bookmark the page, and when I return to it I see new comments highlighted.

[0] https://github.com/insin/hn-comments-owl

https://hnnotify.xyz/

There are a bunch of these services. I use https://hnreplies.com

https://hnrss.org/

Thanks for sharing. I like this one

Happy user of Hnnotify.xyz for over 3 years now. Simple yet effective.

I made a Safari extension (iOS/Mac) that highlights new comments: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/hn-comments/id1602932281 It's for new comments in general though, not exactly what you're asking.

Not much interest so far. Maybe the price is too high? Since I made it primarily for myself there's at least one happy user.

It may just be a discovery issue. I hadn’t heard of your app before you mentioned it here.

I just glance in threads every once in a while and respond if I feel like it. HN will rate limit you sometimes so it disengages me from flamewar style threads - which seems like the intention. Rate limiting makes you take time to think about what you want to actually say or even say anything at all. Overall, I think the UX is "bad by design" because they don't want this place to be like Reddit and Twitter which is just toxic and exhausting.

I usually just don't. The UX is just terrible. Sometimes I get a reply while still browsing the same thread and will respond but otherwise don't bother to check.

For replies to my own posts, I go to the "threads" page.

For replies to others' posts, I keep tabs open for a few days and manually refresh.

What I try to do is upvote whatever I’m replying to so that it at least can sort of act like a notification through karma.

I just look at the threads tab every day. Or more often if I'm engaged in a responsive thread.

I don't. Keeping up with comment threads is something I do at work, not in my free time.

I use feedly rss and save interesting hn links, I’m not able to keep up with the volume so it will be a few days until I look at the comments and they are typically matured by then

If it was actually important then you wouldn’t need notifications

I have subscribed to the RSS feed of responses to my comments.

I just click "threads" every now and then and scroll through and see if there are any replies to read, or that I would want to reply to in turn.

Fire and forget.

It actually bothers me to know that I can find links back to my comments. That can only lead to reaction comments due to butthurt. No good.

https://hnrss.github.io/

My little tool [1] lets you track replies to your comments, or set up keyword notification.

[1] syften.com

I just check my karma and review the comments if there is a delta either way.

Upvote everything after I read it.

Who cares what people say?

They all talk to themselves, anyway.

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