Ask HN: Is there a way to follow people on Hacker News? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Is there a way to follow people on Hacker News?

19 pointsjamescham29 comments

I'm sure there's a way to do it but I haven't figured it out.

I would also like to have longer lived threads, and that users actually discussed, read each others comments, and reply

We need notifications for replies !

So far, posts get posted, end up on the main page, get 300 comments at once from different users, then fall into oblivion. All of that within a few hours

Agree. It’s hard to have a conversation here, but I don’t know exactly why. I suggested once that if usernames were just bolder it would make a difference. Avatars seem like fluff, but I think they really do make it easier to spot a familiar “face”.

Oh, also… I do check “threads” sometimes if I want to keep up with a conversation.

To me, the nested format of comments is the issue. In a flat format like a forum, people are forced to stay on a main line of conversation, with occasional tangents using quotes or new threads. In the HN style, everyone peels away into their own little side discussions, which themselves generate side discussions. It's almost like socialization at a party, and it's encouraged by the heirarchical structure. A detailed one-on-one conversation rapidly runs off to the right side, which discourages it.

Hacker News has a weird cultural dissonance where it's designed to encourage tangential conversations as you mention, but also has numerous features designed to discourage engagement and casual style for the sake of maintaining quality and avoiding the Eternal September effect. It wants to be a water cooler or a pub where people discuss interesting things, but no one polices the conversations in a pub or around a water cooler for topicality, novelty or substance.

It really should use a flat format to that end, but it's written in a lisp, so not having it render a tree view is probably sacrilege.

The difficulty in having conversations reduces the tendency for people to get caught up in the cycle of reactive response. Were to introduce response notification, the engagement metrics would rise, but so would the number of fights. Given that HN isn't incentivized to increase engagement to sell ads, posing such an impediment isn't clearly tied to a dollar valued opportunity cost and therefore easier to swallow.

>The difficulty in having conversations reduces the tendency for people to get caught up in the cycle of reactive response.

The increasingly frequent multi-thousand comment long garbage fire political threads disagree with you.

Right, I'm comparing the design effects of different social media platforms, while you're looking at HN over time. We're not really talking about the same things.

I think we are talking about the same things. I'm claiming the design being discussed doesn't have the effect you believe it does, with the growth of contentious threads being evidence to the contrary.

This is like me saying that the cost of living has certain geographical causes and you saying that's not true because housing prices are rising in Miami.

Are living related and housing price changes related? Sure, but that's not how one would dispell a statement about the former.

If you want a dumpster fire you can head to Reddit. I greatly prefer what HN does to reduce that

I’ve had conversations cut off by the site when there’s too much back-and-forth between me and one other person. Is that still in force?

Yes. Happened to me the other day.

When this happens, you can still reply by clicking the timestamp above the post. The reply button will also appear after a while, the system just wants you to slow down.

i wonder if 'slow' notifications might be a good sweet spot. instead of notifying you about a reply instantly it could send a summary of replies once or twice a day

I feel like the `threads` page already serves this function though, even if not in quite the same way.

Anecdotally yes. The increased use of the threads page correlates to my descent into long threaded back-and-forths.

You can get notifications of replies to your own comments with this service: https://www.hnreplies.com/

Or if you prefer RSS : https://hnrss.github.io/#reply-feeds

Also good for following particular threads : https://hnrss.github.io/#thread-feeds

One of the things I like most about HN is there is not, to my knowledge, any "social" features like this. As mentioned by other comments there are possibly third party UIs/clients that offer a similar feature set. Easiest solution that comes to mind is writing down a username and just checking in when desired.

This is my opinion, too.

If you want deep discussions, you have all the Xchans

Coming back to this randomly - some folks put their contact information in their bios. Not my style but there probably are better formats for long discussion. Plus the HN indentation on long threads is slightly callback hellish

Not on the website, but it's fairly easy to use the (unofficial) RSS feed to get a timeline of someone's posts: https://hnrss.github.io/

that's wonderful, thanks!

I use this tool to get a user's posts as an RSS feed and subscribe to them in Feedly. It also has other search and filter terms:

- http://hnapp.com/

Example: http://hnapp.com/?q=author%3Anickjj

I made a service back in the day that would let you sign up for accounts and receive emails if they posted/commented.

Shared it on HN and it was met with a yawn.

What is the difference between following and just going to their submissions & comments pages? Are you looking for a notification when a person adds something new, a "feed" of the latest from your followees?

Just curious what you specifically want to do?

Some websites have a notification section, and feed it with submissions and/or comments of users you choose

Given the post here a few weeks ago about tracking people through writing style I actually wonder what the point of usernames is.

Maybe it should be possible to have a username so people can activity follow you and see other submissions?

And maybe it would be nice if each time you posted it generated a unique username so that it's anonymous? You could still keep e-mail registration/verification. And perhaps still give moderators access to the master accounts in case they need to see if a user is constantly promoting a company or constantly engaging in anti-social commenting.

Use RSS:

http://hn.algolia.com/userfeed/jamescham

im on instagram @deprogrammer9

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