Ask HN: Do you think HN should add notifications system?

by talhof8 on 4/21/2013, 4:58 PM with 14 comments

On one hand, I think it can be quite useful. When I sumbit a comment or a story, the only way for me to know someone replied, is to re-enter HN later. I miss a lot of replies this way. On the other hand, I think it can ruin HN simplicity and "purity". What do you think?

  • by 1123581321 on 4/21/2013, 5:22 PM

    There is no need thanks to this third-party service: http://hnnotify.com/

  • by DanBC on 5/2/2013, 11:20 AM

    No. There's a problem with a few people who only ever submit articles that they've written (which are hosted on ad heavy websites) and who make no other contribution to HN. I don't want another set of people who only ever contribute to the threads that they've created to discuss some bit of blogspam.

    If anything I think names of people commenting should be hidden for 24 hours, so that you don't know if you're responding to the same person within a thread or not. That might help to cut down snark. (And it avoids the problems we have of toxic-anonymity).

    I also don't think that HN should do this stuff, but should have a nice interface to allow people to create extensions and plugins and user scripts. (There are very many such already. Someone creating a nice curated list with screen shots and user reviews would get huge amounts of karma.)

  • by krapp on 4/21/2013, 5:13 PM

    I think there's plenty of room in the profile for, say, a list of most recent replies (or have a |replies| option show up in the menu.)

    Simplicity is nice but I suppose YMMV as to the line where utility becomes unnecessary complexity. Email notifications might be too much but even then sending them out as a daily digest might not be so spammy.

  • by bcl on 4/21/2013, 5:00 PM

    No.

  • by saurik on 4/21/2013, 5:30 PM

    HN used to have this feature (natively, configured in your profile) by way of Notifo (a Y Combinator startup).

  • by mschuster91 on 4/21/2013, 5:04 PM

    Yes. And I would gladly pay 2 or 3 euros for such a feature.

  • by fakeer on 4/21/2013, 6:47 PM

    I think https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=your_user_id does a pretty good job.

    Though never checked if the API is open for having such an app or one could monitor this by user-id and trigger custom notifications(out of HN I mean) when there are nested replied.