Ask HN: How do you keep up with replies to your posts/comments?

6 pointsposted 6 hours ago
by alcazar

Item id: 47443390

10 Comments

sph

an hour ago

I click the ‘threads’ button in the top bar. 15 years on here, trust me, that’s all you need.

vunderba

4 hours ago

Like many HN users I've got a little bespoke app on my VPS that polls the HackerNews API and looks for responses to any of my comments/posts and then raises a toast notification on my laptop and phone.

Honestly, any reasonably modern LLM could probably crank one out for you in 10 minutes.

https://github.com/HackerNews/API

rolph

6 hours ago

comments you have made:

https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=alcazar

postings you have submitted:

https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=alcazar

alcazar

6 hours ago

So you just refresh those pages and notice when someone adds a new comment? That sounds crazy. There must be a better way.

krapp

6 hours ago

Hacker News is designed under the assumption that the quality of a discussion decreases and the likelihood of arguments/flamewars increases over time, and as the ratio of comments to upvotes increases.

If you aren't willing to to put in the effort of checking for responses to your comments, chances are you have nothing of value to contribute. That it takes more effort to do so over time is a feature, not a bug.

Just do what most people here do and cease to care about any conversation once if falls off your threads page.

alcazar

6 hours ago

Wouldn't the people receiving responses to their comments be the ones with value to contribute? If you don't add value, you're likely not getting replies anyway, so this isn't an issue.

Thanks for confirming that most people are just refreshing their threads page. I was hoping for a better solution, but it is what it is.

saltyoldman

6 hours ago

I have on my personal to-do list to build a firefox extension for it.

alcazar

6 hours ago

I would use it.

If you build it, reply to this comment and hnreplies might tell me about it...