One of the things I positively like about Hacker News is the complete lack of notifications or tools to make it easy to see when someone has replied to me.
Low comment/response velocity is what keeps it from turning into reddit IMO. Meaning, high velocity encourages arguments, negativity and other low value response posts which is what I see all over on Reddit.
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#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
Low comment/response velocity is what keeps it from turning into reddit IMO. Meaning, high velocity encourages arguments, negativity and other low value response posts which is what I see all over on Reddit.
The one unifying characteristic of all social network communities is that they all have a defined Other that they are better than. They all invent some rationale for why they are better but all of them are, in the end, the same.
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#43So this will not show me replies to my comments, it is just showing comments with different layout? It's not very clear from title and description. I am following my comments through threads button in top, though it's not so easy to notice which have new reply and everything need to be checked manually. https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=petodo I wish there was some service where you enter your HN username and i…
A consequence of the current system is that it's impractical for an active user to have long-running conversations. As soon as a comment of mine has scrolled off the first page of threads, i'll almost never see a reply to it. I would want to be very confident that this was a bad thing before "fixing" it. HN's current culture must inevitably be shaped by this effect. How would it change if it was removed? I'm not sure…
The user interface you need to solve that problem is to be able to put in your user ID to see a timeline of all replies to any of your items whatsoever, not replies to a specific post.
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#44One of the things I positively like about Hacker News is the complete lack of notifications or tools to make it easy to see when someone has replied to me.
Gotta love when you see something change and have no idea why, but you've conditioned yourself to like it. A rare occurrence with technology.
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#45One of the things I positively like about Hacker News is the complete lack of notifications or tools to make it easy to see when someone has replied to me.
Low comment/response velocity is what keeps it from turning into reddit IMO. Meaning, high velocity encourages arguments, negativity and other low value response posts which is what I see all over on Reddit.
I think he also found that as two people argued down a thread, their wall of text gets thinner and thinner, and more annoying to read, and hoped that was a deterrence as well.
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#46I use https://hnrss.org/replies?id=timvisee in an RSS reader (Thunderbird in my case). Then I get alerted for comments. Much better! See https://hnrss.github.io/#reply-feeds
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#47Good work and thanks for sharing! hnreplies.com is great if you want an email-based version of something similar.
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Say I'm involved in 17 recent threads, in any of which there can be new replies. Do I have to bookmark 17 hntoast URLs and monitor them?
Or what if, today, someone replies to something I wrote in 2019? [Edit: that won't be possible; HN doesn't allow necroposting!]
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#48I like that HN didn’t act like other forums where 2 commentators go on a long threaded discussion. I like the fact that other people pick up the idea and carry it in the comments. If HNers wanted notifications they would’ve implemented it in the last decade.
HNers have been complaining about wanting notifications since forever, and several people have set up services to that end.
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#49A tiny nit - computers are good at things, so the input box could easily take either a post id - eg 34520664 - or, for ease of use, the whole url - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34520664 - and then do the trivial string manipulation to extract out the id.
Saves the bit of friction going copying address bar to using hntoast.
Just my 2 cents.
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#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
One of the issues with both is that there’s an invisible timer countdown until the point were any reply becomes unseen. On web forums I like to wait a few days before responding, to judge whether or not a response is actually worth the time and will result in a productive conversation. On places like Reddit and Hacker News we don’t have this option - a person usually has a couple of hours, at most a day or two before…
Plenty of times I've received replies to comments that were themselves replies to posts that were a fair number of days old. It depends on how often that person visits HN, how busy is their "threads" timeline and how deeply they go into it. Then, finally, whether or not your comment requires or provokes a response.
Your reply actually made me curious and I logged into an old Hacker News account that I hadn’t used in a few years. Hundreds of comments on that account, many that had a very positive responses (thousands of total points). Yet not a single point was given since I switched accounts, likely because close to no one has read any of those comments since they were made.
On web forums it’s not unusual for me to get replies and reactions for comments that were made a decade ago.