Ask HN: How do you keep track of HN conversations? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How do you keep track of HN conversations?

28 pointsAndrewDucker22 comments

If I make a post on HN, or make a comment I then have to keep checking the comments/submissions page if I want to see if there are any replies.

Hitting refresh on a page seems terribly...1990s. I'm used to sites emailing me when someone replies to something I've written.

How do you manage this?

Edit: It seems that people don't care that much about conversations on HN - which ties in with what I'd expect the system to produce. Notifications seem to be a necessary part of a conversational forum - along with threads.

View on HN

I usually use the "threads" link (what you call the "comments" page) to keep track of current conversations, but I also use site-restricted Google search, e.g.,

http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com+b...

on whatever subject is of current interest to double-check whatever threads may be attracting new comments. The interface here does require a lot more drilling down to follow my submissions than to follow replies to my comments, which I agree is an inconvenience.

I usually just check my karma, if it has moved quite a bit then I go and check the reaction to my comment(s).

Here you go:

http://hackernews.heroku.com/AndrewDucker

I have mine on my RSS aggregator.

Thank you!

Is there something similar for showing comments on posts I submitted?

I believe not.

Thank you very much. This is simple and portable.

I've always wished Hacker News had a Reddit-style reply notification (i.e. something like Reddit's orangered envelope).

It's not just that I want to see who replied to my comments. Sometimes I ask a question or hope for a response from somebody else, but it seems somewhat rare that the other person actually notices I have posted a reply on their comment.

I like that it doesn't; it means that you can generally let go of any debate after a few days.

I used to miss the presence of such a notification feature. But, with the more recent proliferation of comments including "one liners", I'm becoming increasingly appreciative of this approach. Yet another example of apparent lack of a feature actually being a feature.

it means that you can generally let go of any debate after a few days

I feel that it leaves a lot of debates unfinished. This leaves me disappointed and means I don't put as much effort into comments as I might otherwise.

However, I guess its just another one of the reasons I'm only "sort of" an HNer. Its really up to pg to set up the site to act how he wants (shorter discussions could be what he wants).

I tag the HN page -- or any other blog page with comments I want to follow -- at delicious.com with the tag "c" (for comments; the one letter is easy to type).

I've bookmarked the delicious page for my "c" tags.

Then I check whenever I feel the urge and want to spend the time.

It's not as nice as the old co.mments.com site, but there you go.

I don't really want email notifications of comments; I don't need yet another distraction.

I just figured, based on the odd comment here and there by pg, that the comments section of these posts is deliberately user-hostile. shrug so if I happen to remember a news posting with interesting comments (or in which I made a comment), I'll occasionally go see how the conversation is going. Other wise, I just move on with my life.

Just like how the site has the horrible url "news.ycombinator" instead of something sensible like "hackernews.com" ... it's just one of those things...

Slightly differently, I would like a way to keep track of comments that I have upvoted. I often find comments to be more interesting than the articles they are attached to, and sometimes vote up an article I don't particularly like just to make it easier to find the comment later.

Sure, yeah, I could maintain my own separate file of comment links, but even so, I think this would be a nice feature of the site.

I'm not really a programmer, so I can't volunteer for this, but: Assaf Arkin, who ran the co.mments.com site, might be willing to let some true programmer work with PG to bolt his code onto the HN site somehow - his main site is http://labnotes.org/.

I tend not to, then now and again I'll look at my comments and see if there's anything worth looking into.

Your conclusion that "people don't care that much about conversations on HN" is mystifying, since HN is its conversations. I see no problem with having to explicitly check for new comments; I prefer to look at things when I'm ready than to be interrupted.

I don't need to answer in real time, so, in my opinion, checking from time to time is better.

It's not that I need to answer in real time - it's that checking takes effort. It's yet another thing I have to remember to do.

Seeing replies to one's posts is easy, just click on "threads" at the top of the page.

That's the "comments" page I meant above, sorry that wasn't clearer.

refresh, luck and memory; usually if it drops off the main comments page I usually forget about it :)

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