Is there a way to follow people on Hacker News?

I would also like to have longer lived threads, and that users actually discussed, read each others comments, and reply

We need notifications for replies !

So far, posts get posted, end up on the main page, get 300 comments at once from different users, then fall into oblivion. All of that within a few hours

One of the things I like most about HN is there is not, to my knowledge, any "social" features like this. As mentioned by other comments there are possibly third party UIs/clients that offer a similar feature set. Easiest solution that comes to mind is writing down a username and just checking in when desired.

Not on the website, but it's fairly easy to use the (unofficial) RSS feed to get a timeline of someone's posts: https://hnrss.github.io/

I made a service back in the day that would let you sign up for accounts and receive emails if they posted/commented.

Shared it on HN and it was met with a yawn.

What is the difference between following and just going to their submissions & comments pages? Are you looking for a notification when a person adds something new, a "feed" of the latest from your followees?

Just curious what you specifically want to do?

Given the post here a few weeks ago about tracking people through writing style I actually wonder what the point of usernames is.

Maybe it should be possible to have a username so people can activity follow you and see other submissions?

And maybe it would be nice if each time you posted it generated a unique username so that it's anonymous? You could still keep e-mail registration/verification. And perhaps still give moderators access to the master accounts in case they need to see if a user is constantly promoting a company or constantly engaging in anti-social commenting.

Use RSS:

http://hn.algolia.com/userfeed/jamescham

im on instagram @deprogrammer9