there's this: https://www.hnreplies.com I understand it is built by an HN moderator, actually, so somewhat endorsed.
Amazing how simple it is! Kudos to the author, subscribed.
Ask HN: Why doesn't HN alert users in some manner to new replies?
181–190 of 239 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why doesn't HN alert users in some manner to new replies?
#182Please don’t add notification for replies. It will ruin the site. It will have a lot more garbage replies when people are compelled to reply due to gamification. It will make moderation more difficult. Not worth it.
Re: Ask HN: Why doesn't HN alert users in some manner to new replies?
#183This has probably already been brought up in this thread, but you can track responses to your replies via the unofficial HN API.
Re: Ask HN: Why doesn't HN alert users in some manner to new replies?
#184Earlier quoted context omitted.
Last night I had a dream that HN had a new UI. Time to spend less time on HN.
What did it look like?
Mildly related but your love of 'illusion' like here
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30367395
makes me think of this (possibly too glamorous) video of how I imagine HN moderation goes:
Re: Ask HN: Why doesn't HN alert users in some manner to new replies?
#185Honestly 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.
The problem is that old discussions become effectively invisible. If I reply to a post or comment that's over several days old there's almost no chance the author will ever see it.
HN is not for directly communicating with single people. HN is for conversations with a large community. By commenting you can discover and/or influence the collective opinions of a large number of people. But that only works while the community's attention is on a discussion. Once the community moves on, there's no point in continuing a discussion here.
Move 1:1 conversations to another service. Many people put contact information in their profiles, and others can often be found with a little searching. I've had a few people contact me about HN conversations over email and twitter and it's been a generally positive experience. Maybe HN should do more to encourage people to include contact information in their profiles so that this can happen more often.
Re: Ask HN: Why doesn't HN alert users in some manner to new replies?
#186Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are many times I don't reply to a comment that is multiple days old simply because nobody is going to read it. In my experience, the "hot takes" are often low quality comments. Quality comments take time and thought, and HN isn't conducive for that.
This is one of my own frustrations with HN. The issue isn't quite as bad as on other discussion sites, but generally, conversations ... fade quickly. I'd like to see some kind of mechanism which works against this tendency. That said, notifications of themselves ... probably aren't that. Though there might be ways to tweak the mechanic to induce this. Google+ had a Notifications dynamic that seemed to work well in th…
I agree about the problem of quality conversations fading too quickly.
Perhaps HN could add a /topconversations or /yesterdayconversations link that only highlights the best conversation threads from 24 hours ago. That way attention on good discussions could be maintained for an extra day.
Re: Ask HN: Why doesn't HN alert users in some manner to new replies?
#187Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is one of my own frustrations with HN. The issue isn't quite as bad as on other discussion sites, but generally, conversations ... fade quickly. I'd like to see some kind of mechanism which works against this tendency. That said, notifications of themselves ... probably aren't that. Though there might be ways to tweak the mechanic to induce this. Google+ had a Notifications dynamic that seemed to work well in th…
I agree about the problem of quality conversations fading too quickly. Perhaps HN could add a /topconversations or /yesterdayconversations link that only highlights the best conversation threads from 24 hours ago. That way attention on good discussions could be maintained for an extra day.
Re: Ask HN: Why doesn't HN alert users in some manner to new replies?
#188Earlier quoted context omitted.
that thing steals your session cookie without much asking or explaining
Ooof, sorry for posting it then. Would delete or edit if I could.
I don't there's anything deliberately evil about it, it just happens to be effectively credentials harvesting - your auth cookie ends up on someone else's server. If they get compromised, all those HN accounts get compromised. Some people might be ok with that risk, if aware of it.
Re: Ask HN: Why doesn't HN alert users in some manner to new replies?
#189Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
On other forums maybe, but I haven't experienced
much of that here.
Re: Ask HN: Why doesn't HN alert users in some manner to new replies?
#190This has been addressed by dang before, one representative pastequote from a recent (ish) comment: Yes, I think we'll continue to avoid the notification system, not just because of flamewars but also because (relatedly) it's not so compatible with curiosity. Push notifications seem to jack up the nervous system in a way that's good for engagement but not necessarily for users—we all experience this elsewhere on the i…
It's a beautifully quiet design. If I want to check if someone came back I can, and sometimes I don't have the energy to look. The quality is the effect of all these little things, and not something one could affect top down in another design. I suspect there is a ton of sophisticated stuff going on behind the scenes, but even if there were, the effect is still too good to complain about.
I suspect this too, but I suspect even more credit is due to the dang and the moderators quietly doing tastefully heroic work.