Ask HN: How do you have conversations on HN? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How do you have conversations on HN?

27 pointsstevage29 comments

This may be a very dumb question. But: given that HN (the website) has no notifications system for replies, how do you maintain a conversation in the comments?

I may be missing something, but the only way I have come across to see whether anyone has replies to any of my comments is:

1. Click user name (top right) 2. Click "comments" (4th link from the bottom) 3. Refresh periodically and try to notice whether any new comments have arrived that I haven't seen.

In practice for me I only remember to even do step 1 maybe every few weeks or months, so I never really get to participate in actual realtime-ish conversations.

People often talk about how good the discussions are on HN, so I wonder if I'm missing a better way? This seems really hard and clunky.

View on HN

Make your good comment and then don't reply to anyone who replies to you.

What's good about the HN discussion format is its mostly people "adding on" to what someone else said, not classic back and forth discussing. That's actually discouraged (the deeper a thread goes, the longer the delay before you can reply). And it's generally great. Internet debates suck.

Don't debate, add on.

We're all writing together, for a reader.

So HN is basically a wiki :)

I liken HN to an office water cooler that just happens to be next to the boss' office and HR, and both are always listening and taking notes.

People are having conversations about whatever interests them, but you're being graded on intelligence, thoughtfulness, novelty, substance and civility. Wasting too much time on trivialities is counterproductive, and half the people you talk to are trying to impress the boss by sounding too clever by half.

Just click the "threads" link instead of going to you user profile.

What makes the conversations good is not so much that you get to engage in good conversations but you get to see and read some very good conversations, from what I have seen few regularly engage in good conversations on HN and when they do it is just a matter of luck, schedules and knowledge line up or it is actually many people each only adding one or two comments at most. There is a wealth of good conversations on the site but the extended back and forth between two people is not common, everyone just joins in where they can or when impulse over rules reason.

Oh my...wow. I never tried that link. I thought "comments" would be the one I wanted, but that just showed all comments, so didn't try the others.

Summary: You don't.

HN is not designed for real-time conversations, and trying to use it for that is discouraged. If you want real-time conversations - then find a site which is designed for and encourages them.

When I was a teenager, I was in a forum (www.wota.com, long defunct) that had real-time threaded chat with collapsible threads, it was great; anything similar now?

I subscribe to my own replies rss feed.

https://hnrss.org

For example, yours would be: https://hnrss.org/replies?id=stevage

Pop that in an RSS reader and enjoy notifications for anyone who replies to your comments.

For notifications: http://www.hnreplies.com

You have the option of putting your email address or any forum handle in your profile about field. That might be a good option to lead to an off-line conversation.

Unlike many forums, I actually prefer HN for the way it is.

I've spent about half my time rate-limited for some perceived defficiency in my truth telling that afronts @dang. That makes it easy to throughout the day review my comments & scan replies, as it's only a dozen or so comments a day to keep tabs & selectively reply to versus what I might contribute if I weren't rate limited.

Honestly it's probably half better you all have some reprieve from my thoughts. Making it so the bullshit just constantly overruns me & is something I cannot at all deal with, don't have the tokens to respond to. Let the noise flood us out! But even if I am in one of those zones of good grace/non-rate-limitimg - which I think describes most of my behavior well - it's still the same. Check a couple pages of replies. Miss anything way further back.

Being absurdly rate limited for much of my life here does make me think I need a better client experience though. Where how I handle conversations really needs to be an iterable experience. Newsgroups keep seeming like by far the most obvious peer, the intermediary standard that I'd want as model for this place.

I made a Hacker News alerts telegram bot. Reply notifications is one of the implemented features.

https://github.com/lawxls/HackerNews-Alerts-Bot

HN is for everyone, trying to have 1:1 real-time conversations in a forum like this is selfish and rude to the community.

I come here largely to avoid people that want to “have conversations”

The rest of the community does not want to read your conversations, they are interested in good information.. and the only way to have lots of good information is to get rid of the cruft.

Or put another way, the discussions are good because back and forth is discouraged.

When you make a comment you should ask yourself whether this benefits the community.

If it doesn’t then you want to hold off on those type of comments.

You express very many strong opinions (and some presented as facts) here. I don't know where to begin, so I won't.

I have a dedicated browser for HN, and don't have HN logged in on my main surfing profile. That way, I just check in to HN on an infrequent basis. This is forming a habit that I enjoy. If HN was easy to access, then it's game over, and I would be slightly addicted, and having a discrete profile separated from everything else reduces the temptation to check it.

Quite simply, you don't. You make your awesome point in one or two posts and then move on. Moderators will flag and rate limit your account if you get chatty. This website is a notional fraud in that it masquerades as a forum of sorts, but cultivates twitter style fire and forget engagement through its poking and prodding of the userbase.

> Moderators will flag and rate limit your account if you get chatty.

I've never experienced this.

It depends if you annoy one or not. They're trigger happy and there's no walking it back once it happens.

There is so much about HN that it seems that various users know, but which is completely un-findable. All this stuff about moderators, for instance. Not documented anywhere. Weird.

Yes. There is a (third party) GitHub page documenting a lot of the hidden code features, which you may like to check out. The excuse constantly given for all this arbitrary behavior is that "this is what it takes to build a high quality community". Considering this has resulted in what is just 'big-kid reddit', I strongly disagree with this position, but I guess if nothing else all these rules and unaccountable exercises of power serve to cultivate an orthodoxy that is strongly sympathetic to the leadership, which is I guess the true goal. YCombinator is not in the business of hosting a social network so it's not reasonable to expect anything from them really.

How do I find it?

RSS: https://hnrss.github.io/

The friction is a feature, imo. I would prefer return to comment threads with intent, vs. being hijacked by notifications.

> how do you maintain a conversation in the comments?

I press "threads" and look through sometimes.

HN doesn't want you to have conversations. A conversation is a back and forth that carries some state. Instead HN wants you to produce content for them.

discussions != conversations.

divorced of "who said it" the "discussions are good on HN" is that the flow of meaning and lessons I take from comment threads in HN are good and enlightening.

Sometimes the good is "they are well written"

Sometimes the good is "they are well reasoned"

Sometimes the good is "I learned something"

Sometimes the good is "I was entertained" ("are you not entertained" in a Russell Crowe 'Gladiator' voice...)

Sometimes, all 4

Click the Threads link int the top menu.

I use the Hack iPhone app, it has notifications for replies.

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