Remind HN: Followups are impossible if you have no contact details

Reddit style reply notifications might be helpful. It's easy to miss a reply to ones own comments. Knowing this is true for others discourages revisiting an old discussion with new learning and insight, as it won't be seen by those involved in the original conversation, never mind a wider audience.

It would definitely be nice to have as part of HN itself. In the meantime there is http://hnnotify.com/

Thanks for share, I haven't hear of this.

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It always amazed me how the missing features on HN created a bunch of side-services!!

We are a truly creative gang

As noted, HNNotify, but the OP did not talk about this. After some time threads are closed and you cannot comment on them any more. OP suggests people leave contact info in their profiles, in case somebody stumbles onto your comments and wants to talk to you for some reason.

Agree and this is a place where HNNotify doesn't really work - this feature is only useful if most people use it because otherwise you are not going to make the comment in the first place.

I understand that notifications could be helpful in some cases, but I actually like the fact that people don't get notified when someone replies to their comment, and I had assumed this was deliberate. It seems to make debates more objective. For example, if user A makes a statement, and then B disagrees, I like the fact that C can come along and backup A's points, rather than a defensive response from A. (Having notifications that were delayed by an hour or so might make for a good middle ground.)

My understanding is that it, no automatic notification of replies, is deliberate and the reason is to avoid stimulating flame wars. As someone who posts a lot and usually tries to avoid flame wars, the first thing I do on any site is turn off email notifications. If I care, I look at the threading of my comments.

Preventing 'flame wars' by making conversations more awkward and difficult to follow as time goes on just seems to create friction for everyone. And it doesn't prevent flame wars - people who are emotionally invested in an argument will follow a thread on their own accord. We've all seen them, i'm kind of ashamed to say i've participated in a few.

But, notifications could be opt in by default and opt out by choice, and they wouldn't necessarily have to be by email - you could be shown the last few replies to your comments in your account.

Just to clarify terms here, "opt-in" means disabled by default, with user action needed to enable the feature. "opt-out" means on-by-default with the ability to disable it: exactly the situation you describe. At least, that's my understanding.

I may have misstated, then.. I meant that by default, you wouldn't get any notifications unless you chose to, and if you did, you could turn them off at any time.

A longer delay would also be fine. Perhaps after a certain amount of time notifications could be turned on - say 5 days after a post + 1 hour delay? That seems to be in line with the OP, but I'm not sure.

I think an explanation next to all fields on the personal settings page would be great.

For example, when I first landed there, noprocrast just made me feel like an outsider. What the heck is that? Okay, english is not my mother-tongue, I didn't even know the word procrastination. Let's add some entrepreneur thinking: if I don't know what it means, nobody does! ^^

This is probably the best proposed, and least intrusive, solution to what may or may not be a problem.

It's probably not the sort of thing that should be formalized, yet I feel that HN could be bringing people together more than it currently does. I wonder what new things could be tried.

How about a 'private follow' capability that maps to a list of all stories with at least one comment from someone on your private follow list? Avoids public popularity metrics yet enables filtering and possibly engagement that spans stories.

Adding a new profile field that says "contact email (optional)" seems like it might actually help a lot.

Or even just a check box to make the already-provided email public.

Agreed!

A sticky 'meet-ups' tab perhaps?

Could be interesting for small coffee events, perhaps not so much bigger conventions.

A HN convention would be very interesting though.

> It's probably not the sort of thing that should be formalized, yet I feel that HN could be bringing people together more than it currently does.

Completely agree on this. Sometimes I even thought that the lack of the typical features that help creating "relationships" here was by design, to make it more difficult build coalitions/voting rings/subgroups.

What about simply adding private messaging? With an opt-out option for the receiver and a (low) minimum karma threshold for the sender, just to make it more difficult to create spam bots.

As much as I value the idea of anonymity, people who want to be contacted can put that information in their profile. And many people do.

The amount of effort required to reach anyone who provides information in their profile feels about right. Contacting someone should be deliberate not reactive. If Googling or cutting and pasting a link is too much work, It can't be that important.

I've seen periodic rashes of emails from people with proposals or trying to promote stuff with generic emails I'm not even remotely interested in that I can trace back to my address being scraped from HN, this is a pity because it made me consider removing my contact details. I have no problem with personal approaches but the 'hustlers and growth hackers' can get on your nerves.

The large number of online and in-real-life friends I've made here ensured that it is still up and will stay up without any obfuscation or other gimmicks.

Maybe HN needs a basic personal messaging system?

I'd like to see this as an alternative.

This post prompted me to add a contact email (obfuscated to hopefully guard against automated scraping), but we really shouldn't have to do this.

...and thus fulfilling Zawinski's law of software development [0]:

“Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.”

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamie_Zawinski#Zawinski.27s_la...

I have had a contact email for a very long time, but I haven't noticed any spam on it (gmail seems to have a great filter).

That said I have received a few emails that were the result of HN comments so I would strongly suggest adding one in.

Yes, I had no idea the email field isn't publicly visible. Thanks for the heads up :)

Me, too. And I've been here twice as long!

Hijiking this thread, since mine got no traction...

What would also be great is if HN provided a field to add our public keys.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9359536

In the meantime, if you put a website in your profile, add your public key somewhere in there.

I've seen them in people's profile.

Would anyone be interested if I made "profiles and notifications" for HN ... and you could follow people or topics?

I registered the domain name http://show.hn for just such an idea.

> Many times I want to follow up on the discussion, to recount more up-to-date experiences, or to find out what happened so I can share in any discoveries made. People so often learn things, and so rarely come back to share them.

So: Blog your new experiences, submit them to HN, and (if this link is more relevant to HN than to readers hitting your blog otherwise) make a comment noting the relation to the previous HN discussion, with an appropriate link.

You don't need personal contact details to post a followup to a discussion on an open public forum.

I provide one for introductions that winds up in my 'real' inbox. I've made one great contact through it so far and hope to make more as time goes on. No issues with spam.

I share my contact details because I want to give people the ability to follow up with me privately on a submission or comment I made. HN is a wonderful community and I treasure its openness but sometimes you just want to be discreet about certain things. It's also a good way to prevent thread hijacking.

I'm also explicitly seeking someone right now (a co-founder) and leaving contact details gives an interested person a way to follow up with that.

A related reminder: If you're active on GitHub, have contributed to any FOSS project, or have participated in any mailing list (including Google Groups), your email address is probably public already. So you can stop worrying about spambots harvesting your email address. All the spambots know about you already.

Correct. For some of us it is more about not linking our hn persona with our email. There exist a number of reasons for why this is beneficial to some of us: woking at certain places, families with certain ideas, living in certain countries etc.

Using an address from an email forwarding service such as spamgourmet might not mitigate all of these concerns, but it should mitigate some of them. Says the guy who doesn't have even a spamgourmet address in his profile. Hmm, maybe I'll do that.

LEO and the NSA would like it if you add as much personal information as possible, so please do that and help them out.