Ask HN: How to “subscribe” to comments in a specific post? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How to “subscribe” to comments in a specific post?

18 pointsjiriro19 comments

Is there a way to follow up/get notified about new comments in a specific post?

If there were a way to add votes in other dimensions, this would be less of an issue. You could then weight a matrix to get a view of things tailored to your preferences without using 3rd party tools.

Examples of multi-dimensional voting:

  https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1603656085390270464
  My plane is not trackable without using non-public data (twitter.com/elonmusk)

  Up in Elon Musk, Twitter, ADSB, Politics
  Down in Truth 

  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33999983
  The Suppressed Electrodynamics of Ampère-Gauss-Weber (2001) (21sci-tech.com)

  Up in Physics, Fringe Science, Rant, Rabbit Hole
  Down in Truth

There are lots of things that get lost when you are forced into a single dimension.

There is a HUGE gain, and that's the fact that it forces the community to agree on what an upvote or downvote means, at least it should.

It has often been unclear to me why things get voted the way they do. Splitting votes into many dimensions might fix that.

I agree; I would prefer to get rid of the voting entirely if it is limited to one dimension. If votes are available for many dimensions, then the votes might be good and useful; as they are, I do not like them and do not use them, and would rather have an option to use chronological display order. (If you can download the file on your computer and run your own SQL queries, then you can also make up your own criteria however you want to do. However, in such a case, it should need to support incremental updates.)

https://hnrss.org/replies?id=

I love anything where the URL is the UI :-)

Just yesterday I was noting how I up vote comments I want to check on later, and then click on my profile page and go through them.

https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=jiriro but no notifications

Also Hack app ha push notifications: https://apps.apple.com/app/id1464477788

There's an official API.

https://github.com/HackerNews/API

Not without third party tools. Dang thinks this basic feature that has existed in forums since the dawn of time promotes toxicity.

Something existing for a long time says nothing about whether it is positive or not.

It was positive enough for people to use it for a long time, while having the ability to change it and not doing so. Surely that means something?

it does not mean it was positive, people do a lot of things since the dawn of time (slavery for example).

the fact that something was used for a long time means only that it was used for a long time, and everything else is up for interpretation.

this dang?

Most of its usage is on platforms where engagement is how they make money. Any kind of engagement. Considering flamewars, nitpicking and arguments are goldmines that capture user attention, it's in the platform's best interest to draw attention to threads via notifications.

Is this the right thing for HN? I don't know. But they've decided it's worth the trade off, I think.

And most forums break down into toxic fights since the dawn of time. What’s the problem with his view?

On a forum it really is much better when you give your 2c and then forget about the thread than hovering over it intercepting every new utterance. Time to close the browser tab.

> Dang thinks this basic feature that has existed in forums since the dawn of time promotes toxicity.

It lowers the barrier to entry, coddling and inevitably inviting the lazy, thus nudging the needle towards the lowest common denominator, which is ill-advised.

gatekeeping is toxic

When I bar you from my house because your muddy boots will soil the floor, I have faith that you will somehow survive this terrible injustice.

Gatekeeping is not toxic. Where did people get this idea?

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