Ask HN: Do you think HN should add notifications system? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Do you think HN should add notifications system?

8 pointstalhof814 comments

On one hand, I think it can be quite useful. When I sumbit a comment or a story, the only way for me to know someone replied, is to re-enter HN later. I miss a lot of replies this way. On the other hand, I think it can ruin HN simplicity and "purity". What do you think?

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There is no need thanks to this third-party service: http://hnnotify.com/

That's a nice service, but the developer could use this to find out the emails of subscribers. He does have a quick note about privacy: "I will not sell or share the email list with anyone." But this doesn't seem sufficient.

This comes at the right time. I started a similar thing yesterday night ^^.

Seems like I won't need it after all

Wasn't aware of that, thanks. Though normal, not by email, notifications would do better I think.

I assume you mean in-site notifications. I don't think that will ever happen because of all the measures PG takes to reduce the amount of back-and-forth discussion on the site.

hnnotify.com works reliably. I have been using it for years.

No. There's a problem with a few people who only ever submit articles that they've written (which are hosted on ad heavy websites) and who make no other contribution to HN. I don't want another set of people who only ever contribute to the threads that they've created to discuss some bit of blogspam.

If anything I think names of people commenting should be hidden for 24 hours, so that you don't know if you're responding to the same person within a thread or not. That might help to cut down snark. (And it avoids the problems we have of toxic-anonymity).

I also don't think that HN should do this stuff, but should have a nice interface to allow people to create extensions and plugins and user scripts. (There are very many such already. Someone creating a nice curated list with screen shots and user reviews would get huge amounts of karma.)

I think there's plenty of room in the profile for, say, a list of most recent replies (or have a |replies| option show up in the menu.)

Simplicity is nice but I suppose YMMV as to the line where utility becomes unnecessary complexity. Email notifications might be too much but even then sending them out as a daily digest might not be so spammy.

No.

+1 to No.

HN used to have this feature (natively, configured in your profile) by way of Notifo (a Y Combinator startup).

Notifo was shut down long ago. I just saw the goodbye post. Ironically their blog is hosted on Posterous.

Yes. And I would gladly pay 2 or 3 euros for such a feature.

I think https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=your_user_id does a pretty good job.

Though never checked if the API is open for having such an app or one could monitor this by user-id and trigger custom notifications(out of HN I mean) when there are nested replied.

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