Ask HN: How do you keep up with replies to your posts/comments? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How do you keep up with replies to your posts/comments?

6 pointsalcazar12 comments

I've been posting stories and commenting on HN for a while now, and it's frustrating that I never know when someone replies to me.

It looks like there's no built in notification system. No emails, no alerts on the site, no replies page or anything.

So how do you all handle it? Do most people just leave tabs open and refresh them? Or bookmark your own comments and check manually every so often?

We recently found hnreplies.com which works great for replies to comments (it does email and RSS). But it doesn't cover replies to your actual posts. Is there a service that does both? Or do people use something else?

Would be good to hear how you do it. Thanks!

View on HN

Like many HN users I've got a little bespoke app on my VPS that polls the HackerNews API and looks for responses to any of my comments/posts and then raises a toast notification on my laptop and phone.

Honestly, any reasonably modern LLM could probably crank one out for you in 10 minutes.

https://github.com/HackerNews/API

I built https://hackernewsalerts.com for that. Think I have about 100 users. It's open source, see links on the site.

Thanks! I’ve signed up to try it in parallel with hnreplies.com. I like that this one supports post comments as well.

FYI, the online tool to test without signing up (https://hackernewsalerts.com/view-comments-replies/) didn’t work for my username.

EDIT: Perhaps that was an apt warning. After signup I received 20 updates for comments that weren't mine. Possibly leaking the usernames of other subscribers to the service.

comments you have made:

https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=alcazar

postings you have submitted:

https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=alcazar

So you just refresh those pages and notice when someone adds a new comment? That sounds crazy. There must be a better way.

Hacker News is designed under the assumption that the quality of a discussion decreases and the likelihood of arguments/flamewars increases over time, and as the ratio of comments to upvotes increases.

If you aren't willing to to put in the effort of checking for responses to your comments, chances are you have nothing of value to contribute. That it takes more effort to do so over time is a feature, not a bug.

Just do what most people here do and cease to care about any conversation once if falls off your threads page.

Wouldn't the people receiving responses to their comments be the ones with value to contribute? If you don't add value, you're likely not getting replies anyway, so this isn't an issue.

Thanks for confirming that most people are just refreshing their threads page. I was hoping for a better solution, but it is what it is.

Sign up to https://www.hnreplies.com/ or just have AI build your own in whatever shape you want it to be. or use an app like Hack.

I click the ‘threads’ button in the top bar. 15 years on here, trust me, that’s all you need.

I have on my personal to-do list to build a firefox extension for it.

I would use it.

If you build it, reply to this comment and hnreplies might tell me about it...

You do not need to know about the replies, but if some topic is important for you - remember you only have 2 weeks of active commenting.

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