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Comment by al_borland | Hacker News Reader

I just use the browser, it works well enough for me. There are apps people have made.

Without ads, the incentives aren’t such that they should want to drive excessive engagement.

Most directly, if somebody replies to your comment and you get a notification about that and it results in an ad impression: ka-Ching!

Yea, notifications can be considered annoying. but I sometimes miss replies to some posts, cause HN right now doesn't even track these.

Maybe a design decision to reduce infra load.

I see this as a feature. I check the “threads” like periodically to see if there is anything to reply to, but once it falls off the first page, it’s pretty much over (unless it’s something very specific I wanted to keep an eye on, which is rare).

This prevents a lot of the long back and forths, or getting pulled into an old conversation, that would often happen on other platforms with notifications.

It makes a reply more of an intentional act. With notifications it feels more like a task that needs to be completed.

Interesting take. Fair enough.

How about you saw the comment number go up and you open and now have to scroll entire thread to find where the new comment is at.

If we look at something like Reddit, back when I used that, if I had a really popular comment I would feel the need to go though every notification, read it, and respond if it was warranted. This could end up being a lot of work. It was also an issue, because Reddit’s notification page was broken (last I used it), so the unread list would break when trying to go to a second page. So to catch them all, one had to note down the number of replies, then count, going page by page, until the comment count viewed matched the noted notification count. This was quite a pain.

Here on HN, if I have a popular comment, I can see that it generated a lot of discussion and tend to scroll through it and read/skim it like I would most other comments, especially once they start nesting further.

The net result of the HN model feels like less stress, as notifications imply some form of obligation. Why would I be getting a notification if it wasn’t important?

That's fair. I guess incentive is the key.

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