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Comment by rimunroe | Hacker News Reader

The person who used to run the server network I was describing replied to me, but alas I think they didn’t see my reply[1]. This is one of the few times I wish HN notified you of replies. Maybe I’ll run into them again in another decade or two.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44953109 (of course, rACEmic might just not be interested in reconnecting, which is obviously okay)

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I use HNReplies. It sends an email for each reply, and is quite reliable and fast.

My point is that a brand new user might not know they need to manually check for replies. They’re much less likely to know about some third party utility for monitoring them

That’s a feature, not a bug. Real time Reddit-style reply notifications encourage flamewars, or at least less thoughtful comments. I’ve even found myself falling into that trap now that I get notifications from HNReplies.

Hm thanks for the meta-discussion. I thought I was missing a "reply notification" setting somewhere and was meaning to go search for enabling it one day.

This was also my experience when joining the site. Nowadays I appreciate not having the notifications, but when I joined I didn’t realize there weren’t any and I missed some comments I would have preferred to respond to.

Please note I said “This is one of the few times I wish HN notified you of replies”. I’m normally glad it doesn’t notify me for that very reason.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com