161–170 of 239 posts
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https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=warrenm The link is not in the topbar but it's easy to find in your profile.
thanks for proving my point: I had to go hunting for this submission just to see if anyone had replied/answered And no one has (as of 1133 EST 17-Feb-2022) provided a real answer for why HN has such an obvious feature missing :)
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What makes a forum interesting IMO is the back and forth discussion that sometimes happens, as long as it's respectful and productive. If you don't occasionally check and answer replies, you'd miss out on the chance of having your opinion challenged and having to defend or amend it, which is a good opportunity for growth. Otherwise it's akin to throwing your thoughts into the well and walking away. You might as well…
You also "miss the opportunity" to engage in an endless, repetitive non-constructive back-and-forth which is much more common than a back-and-forth-of-personal-intellectual-growth. It's hard to believe notifications (rather than, say, deliberate personal interest and effort) would help drive the latter while we know for a fact they help generate a lot of the former.
On other forums maybe, but I haven't experienced much of that here.
Regardless, this is clearly something _some_ users want, so that we can avoid wasting time manually hunting for new replies. For those who don't, it can be an optional feature and they wouldn't have to use it.
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No, it's not If you ask a question, and I happen to see it a couple days later and can answer it, why would you not want to see said answer?
Because conversations have lifespans. If I want to see said answer I can visit my profile and check. But I don't want the website constantly pestering me "someone responded to that thing you said a week ago!" If I'm still curious of the answer a few days later I can check my profile a few days later
Philosophers have been answering, or at least asking, the same questions for centuries and millennia. Technical and scientific questions can span years or decades. Political and social ones, decades and centuries.
No, it's not necessary to drag all of past discourse into each individual conversation. But neither is it reasonable to demand that all discussions die within a few hours, or a day at the outside, on the most perfect text-based global communications platform ever developed.
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You also "miss the opportunity" to engage in an endless, repetitive non-constructive back-and-forth which is much more common than a back-and-forth-of-personal-intellectual-growth. It's hard to believe notifications (rather than, say, deliberate personal interest and effort) would help drive the latter while we know for a fact they help generate a lot of the former.
> You also "miss the opportunity" to engage in an endless, repetitive non-constructive back-and-forth which is much more common than a back-and-forth-of-personal-intellectual-growth. On other forums maybe, but I haven't experienced much of that here. Regardless, this is clearly something _some_ users want, so that we can avoid wasting time manually hunting for new replies. For those who don't, it can be an optional f…
If I see my karma go up, that usually tells me that someone may have replied to something I said. Otherwise, I'm glad there's no alert for new replies. Conversation should be intentional. If I'm gonna be reading what someone said in response to me, I better already have enough motivation to check back and see if someone replied. When I don't check back, it's probably because I've got something more important to focus…
I use a custom style sheet to hide my karma score (except on user profile page where I can go if I'm super curious). It's broke an unhealthy cycle I would subconsciously try to craft the perfect reply and get an addiction-inducing high from some big karma boost. Or big productivity-killing negative response.
Honestly I’m glad it doesn’t. Reply notifications may increase engagement, but I’d argue they reduce the quality of discussion, since such notifications would encourage rapid back and forth arguments.
They could do delayed notifications. Not having them at all sucks because you are pretty much guaranteed not to see replies to older comments.
I'm less curious about late replies than I am about late upvotes. Sometimes karma ticks upward and I can't figure out what people liked. It'd be nice to be able to figure this out — does anyone know if any of the browser plugins offer such a functionality?
Because I suspect YC minimally maintain HN. Not specifically a bad per-se, but don't expect anything new to happen.
There are a lot of changes, just mostly not visible, or only subtly visible. That's on purpose, because (a) users hate design changes and (b) pg-style minimalism is encoded into the DNA and it would be a mistake to mess with that.
It is one of the last and most triumphant remnants of the era of forums.
You log in when you want; you read things you want to read, when you want to read them.
It is not a cult of personality revolving around who replies to what. The idea, the object is centre stage -- and that's the way it should be.
It is not a social network. It is a news aggregator where comments add to, and revolve around, the links submitted and the ideas they represent.
This is a place for exchanging knowledge.
There really aren't many places like HN around, and I treasure it.