Why doesn't HN alert users in some manner to new replies?

This 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 internet, and on HN we're in the blessed position of not needing to juice the numbers.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22937472

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.

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 my attention on, and when I reply to someone I assume there's only a small chance they'll actually see it or reply back.

An extension to alert for replies to recent comments/submissions could be really easy to make, though. Just check `/threads?id=` every few minutes, compare the content of the previous page snapshot, and collect unique replies into a set.

there's this: https://www.hnreplies.com I understand it is built by an HN moderator, actually, so somewhat endorsed.

I love that they don't change anything. Social media services like Reddit that change things eventually change into shit.

I get mine from https://hnnotify.xyz/ - seems to work well.

I agree that it would be nice for HN to manage this directly.

One of the really good things about HN is the Algolia integration so building things like a notifier relatively easy. The structure of the data means you can do a lot. The HTML of the pages is old-school enough that rewriting it with a browser plugin is straightforward too. HN is "hackable" in the classic sense of the word. You can build your own things on top of it.

It doesn't need extra features if they just read data and do things when stuff changes - you can do that yourself.

I used https://hnrss.github.io/ for a while. I worked really well but I eventually realized I didn't want it.

The only thing I'm personally missing from the current system is a chance to find replies to older comments.

As an HN-ish proposal, how about a link on the user page for replies, but only to comments which can't be downvoted (24 hours, for those who might not know)? It could have a number next to it and would surface replies from newest to oldest, but again, only to comments outside of the downvote window.

This would allow some conversations of technical interest to play out days or weeks later, which is of value to users who find hacker news threads sometimes years after the topic was current.

This avoids the dopamine bump of active notifications completely, and prevents tossing gasoline on flamewars, which only rage while the antikarma button is active.

It would change the dynamics of the comment section a lot.

Instead of varied thoughts from many people in replies you’d be much more likely to have the one person arguing their point against replies which is terrible every time I see ot.

Because it is a feature.

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.

One less dopamine hit that I can definitely live without. I also feel it gives people less incentive to craft replies for others and instead comment intelligently (yes, there are many replies which are not that, but I have faith the majority are)

Why doesn't HN do a lot of things? HN tries to be minimalistic, and a lot of people are happy with that (me included).

I just click on the Threads to see what happened to something I wrote. I like that it is minimalist. I think it invites a more considered approach to what I write.

I wish it had something like a reply counter. I understand that creating and maintaining a notification system is not ideal. But if there is a counter for the number of replies I've gotten, and the number is larger than yesterday, then I know I have to check my comment history.

OT: how come links in HN text submissions are sometimes clickable and sometimes not?

Example of an HN text submission where links are clickable: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30345201

Please 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.

I think its a fantastic UX decision. If you care about a discussion you're having you'll check your replies. Telling you someone replied to you encourages lazy responses.

I do think "upvoted old comments" would be worth notifying about after some cooling duration.

I'll sometimes see I got upvoted, and I'll notice it wasn't one of my recent comments (since my recent comments will all be 1 karma).

If the feedback loop between knowing a comment was upvoted is short, sure, that encourages trying to get upvotes (rather than trying to make good discussion). But I think it'd be good to see what old comments I wrote people thought were worth upvoting.

Hacker news is sadly a community where Posts, and conversations die quickly. Without features like notifications no one would ever come back to notice the comments like this. There are other choices that could be made to enable conversations to live on and grow versus flame out and die.

Without such features the same conversations Will need to be repeated again and again as I see you so often here and exactly the same way, but never to progress forward. Much like our society itself.

Hacker news is one of my main sources of information, so it is definitely better than other even worse options. But it is sad that despite my reading over 500 posts a week,

I almost never comment or participate in conversations because the way I consume hacker news is slow. It’s sad and I wish I could affect it, but I can’t because no one will ever read this comment.

I don’t know why I am posting this, just speaking to myself so cathartic perhaps.

Like the other comments, I also feel that would be a bad idea. I have seen, like, two of my submissions hitting the home page. I then jump in and start commenting. It is all over the place and I would NOT want any notifications for that frenzy.

Most of the times, I just quietly read the comments and try to converse where it makes sense -- either I'm getting something or giving something in return.

You can use an RSS reader to monitor for replies. The URL would be something like:

https://hnrss.org/replies?id=greedo

I'm not sure who maintains the site, but it helps me notice replies to my comments. And since I only check it once a day or so, I don't get too involved with flamewars.

Not exactly what you're asking but I made a Safari extension (iOS/Mac) to highlights new comments: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/hn-comments/id1602932281

A whopping 5 downloads so far. :p

case in point: I asked this question ~1 hour ago, it's garnered (as of this comment) 78 comments, and yet I had to go hunting for it when I got back to HN

i think this feature is needed. Often times, an insightful reply to a question is asked (others want to see it too) but the OP just may not have noticed it.

so, maybe 8 hours later, if there is no response from OP for a reply made, a notification is sent? OP may choose to ignore of course.

Because HN is a non profit thing that doesn't make money on "engagement".

Seriously, you don't have enough interruptions?

If you really want to see if your comments have been replied to, you can see that in the list of your comments.

I use and self-host the opensource tool – huginn. [1]

I have an agent that watches the RSS feed for replies to my username.[2] Then the huginn agent sends me an email when new replies come in. The beautiful thing is, I can quickly change one setting and throttle down the emails. Only getting an email with a summary of all replies, every X hours, if I want.

[1] https://github.com/huginn/huginn

[2] https://hnrss.github.io/

One of the few things that I like about HN is that when someone responds to your comment you are not necessarily supposed to reply to that, definitely not the only one. I don't think it is by design, but anyhow it has come to be as such. Sometimes you don't even have to respond, or anyone for that matter. Not having a notification system adds in this.

PS. Visible karma system is one of the worst things on HN and among many that I don't like. It has no place to be here. At the very least it ought not to be exposed on profiles and comments.

I don't mind the absence of notifications per se (in fact I think it's a good thing).

But I do mind that there is no easy way (not even visually!) to track "unread" replies, especially direct replies in older posts.

It does make me wonder how many chances I've missed at stimulating conversation on a topic I was interested, whereas now it just looks like I'm ghosting people.

I wouldn't mind "tagging" for instance (i.e. not all notifications enabled by default, but the ability to be notified when "tagged", e.g. via @username)

Being able to distinguish new replies from existing replies in a comment thread is something that would be useful. On Reddit, you can get that if you're a moderator or have a gold subscription.

News and email clients would highlight new messages you just downloaded. What would be nice is if Hackernews would do something similar. For example, using the e tag header to decide which comments are rendered differently so that it's easy to see that they're new comments since the page was last viewed.

Long ago dang shared with me that reply chain length is proportional to the tendency to violate the HN comment guidelines. HN is passionate about high quality non-toxic discussion.

Its typical that everyone is defending the status quo. I doubt the reason it doesn't have that feature is because they are against it. I think it's just one of those things that adds a significant amount of complexity without a ton of benefit for most people. But I also think if they had several developers working on the site, they would have done it.

You can just scan down recent threads to see if there are replies.

But it's objectively a missing feature that could be somewhat useful.

That little bit of a friction makes all the difference. The only people who will see replies are those who are invested in the discussion. (ie, those who will return and refresh the page to see who has added what comments.) Alert replies would simply increase "engagement," and at least broadly we've seen that engagement is good for user addiction, but poor for discourse and site health.

That sounds horrible, I’m usually using hn while working, the last thing I need is another distraction. I like intentionality of the platform

I agree with the reasoning not to have notifications mentioned here.

However, a related request would be an easy way to identify new comments on a conversation thread when you're on the threads page. Is that something that can be done?

If I have an active day on HN it can be difficult to determine which comments I've read and won't reply to from new comments I'd like to reply to.

HN barely holds together as it is. Despite the simplicity of it the site undergoes frequent outages and performance degradations. Long threads get paged in an absolutely insane way because of performance problems and a fix has been underway for several years according to the stock message dang leaves at the top of such threads.

Because I suspect YC minimally maintain HN. Not specifically a bad per-se, but don't expect anything new to happen.

And how to sort comments by date order so you can easily see what's been posted new since you last read a topic.

I did a telegram bot for this at some point, but it ended up very annoying and I just abandoned the project. Code is here if you want it: https://github.com/golergka/hn-comment-bot

I’m using HACK app, that send you push notifications for reply: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/hack-for-hacker-news-developer...

HN had this functionality for a while some 10+ years ago. Our YC startup Notifo had integration for HN reply pushes. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1203104

I am not sure I would want this by default.

I would like an opt-in setting where if I made a top-level comment I get notified if any of the following are true:

- My Comment is upvoted 5 times and I get a Reply. - A Reply to my Comment on it is upvoted 5 times. - I receive more than 3 Replies.

This is my biggest beef with HN, along with the presence of up/downvote buttons.

I feel with HN. If you want specific behavior, program for it. When you're done, preferably don't publish the code, so that it can easily take the extra few requests that you're making ;-)

I am very grateful that HN does not have alert notifications. It sets it clearly apart from the social networks and positions it as a useful tool to learn information.

If alerts were an optional feature of HN, I would use them.

I'm pretty sure upvoting a comment is seen as a means to notify someone on HN. Maybe it's only in my head but that's how I see it.

if anyone is interested in being notified when there is new reply, checkout the hacker news app I made recently: (https://github.com/livinglist/Hacki ), you will get in-app notification when there is new reply to your comments or stories.

This has probably already been brought up in this thread, but you can track responses to your replies via the unofficial HN API.

TL;DR:

9,000 notifications in 25 days!

Notifications are evil. Or, they can be...

Flo by Moen: I have received nearly 9,000 emails from Flo between January 24th and today, February 17th. Yes, that is an average of 360 emails per for 25 days.

Curious? Read on.

Our insurance company had us install a water leak sensor device made by Moen called "Flo":

https://www.moen.com/search/smart+water

My opinion (and just my opinion) it's a piece of garbage, a waste of time and money.

With that out of the way...

This thing alerts you when it detects various event. It's supposed to be smart? Nah, actually, it's dumb as &*ck.

Example: One of my kids decided a 1.5 hour shower was a good idea. Flo shutoff the water to the entire house at 90 minutes. If this had been a broken pipe in the walls, running for 90 minutes, well, the damage would easily be in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. This is stupid. It protects nothing.

The only scenario where that would have had some value might be if you go on vacation for a week and a water pipe breaks. OK, well, I generally shutoff the water when we go on vacation, so there is no value to this device.

One of the particular notifications has to do with water pressure. Flo sends you an alarm to your phone (via their app) and via email when it exceeds a certain value. We have always had high water pressure. By always I mean, over twenty years. No problems at all. I like this. High water pressure is useful. Flo does not like it.

I probably get no less than ten notifications per day on the app about water pressure. You can snooze them for 24 hours on the app. So, I have to deal with these nonsense notifications every single day. And I can't tell Flo "this is normal, forever, don't bug me".

Email?

As I said at the top, about 360 emails per day, on average, for high water pressure. I now have a collection of nearly 9,000 of these email notifications received during the last 25 days.

Evil.

Because it would be a total nightmare.

Try RSS, they have it for replies.

For the same reason PG proposed turning HN off “during office hours” several years back

There's an API. Go nuts.

Add me to the camp that is happy there are no notifications.

I've been using this Chrome extension for a while and it's worked really well for me: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news-notifi...

They recently tweeted

> In the last 30 days, Hacker News users sent out 337,875 comments, responding to 29,258 users.

https://twitter.com/magicbell_io/status/1488441548857561095

No thanks.

Automatic plug whenever I see this asked: nnhackernews.

Lots of sour grapes rationalizing.

Every deprived addict, from the grounded Minecraft player to the imprisoned dope fiend, will tell you the deprivation was good for him, but as soon he's given a shot at another fix, he'll instantly take it.

I hate Slack's always-on nature. That I keep using it should tell me how I really feel about it.

It's a filter, and it works very well. If you're tech savvy you can figure it out for yourself, if you're not then what are you doing on HN?

Here is your latest reply RSS feed: https://hnrss.org/replies?id=warrenm