Here is the proof. [0]
> yes please! i need a "comment to follow" functionality on HN
So I built it. I built this for one user named swyx. I'm going to email him now letting him know I built it.
HN Notifier
https://github.com/meanands/hn-notifier
Hacker New Telegram Bot
https://github.com/lawxls/HackerNews-Alerts-Bot
HN Reply Notifier
https://github.com/lotsofnoise/hn-reply-notifier
And there have been Show HNs on them as well.
Show HN: I built an open-source notification inbox widget for Hacker News
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36373123
Show HN: HN Reader – Track your conversations across Hacker News
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46240221
I (and probably a lot of other HN users) built my own bespoke HN suite that notifies me on replies, stories that I might be interested in, etc. It just sits quietly on a VPS and sends messages to me over Signal. Never open-sourced it because the code is a dire abomination.
Yours is probably the first Chrome side-panel variation that I've seen though.
It is one of these services that just work.
Thank you, Dan Grossman!
Here's some discussion of one recent one:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21172406
And some more:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42814917
And HNChat, which went a little further:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12431724
That said, don't take this as criticism. It's clearly something that some HN users want. If you can make it stick, more power to you!
Swyx is certainly a taste maker!
Mine is just to track conversations. You can follow a thread and get notified when it is updated. It used to work on Firefox Mobile but some how an automatic android update disabled my extension and I have not spent the time to fix it.