Hey John, I'm just curious how people find these comments about "would be nice if X saw this" on HN. I don't think there's any pinging behavior. Did somebody message you? Did you just happen to read it? Do you have an eldritch curse that summons you when called by name?
Somebody subscribed to my blog with ref to hacker news so i just poked my head in :-)
I use f5bot.com, which monitors HN, Reddit, and Lobsters. (I have no connection to f5bot except being a happy user.)
Not who you're asking for, but generally I think it's just a case of the author also being an HN regular. Although, I suppose you could set up some Google Alerts for mentions of your blog posts.
Once upon a time there was a guy who went by Kibo who would search Usenet feeds for posts mentioning his username and reply to them...
I bet Musk hacked something together (or has a column in TweetDeck if that's still around) that continuously searches for mentions. I wonder if there's a tool like that that covers more of the internet, although the primary users would only be famous people and/or their agents / social media staff.
There are lots of tools that do this if you are willing to pay for it. "Social Media Monitoring" or "Brand Monitoring" would be the keywords to search for
It monitors keywords mentioned on X, Linkedin, Facebook, Youtube, Quora, Reddit, and YC.
Kibo greps
From what I've seen, sometimes people see that their blog post got a lot of referral traffic from Hacker News and they come have a look to see where it came from.
I've seen Ken Shirriff do this. You mention him and suddenly he's there.
hi! :-)
As I commented elsewhere, f5bot.com is a nice, free tool to monitor HN