Ask HN: ‘Following’ Other HN Users?

[fisherjeff]

I’m conflicted about even asking this. I do really love that HN is only very lightly curated for me, and I’m evenly exposed to the opinions of a fairly random sample of people on a daily basis. It’s easily the standout feature of this site.

But still… It does often feel too ephemeral. I sometimes wish I were able to easily keep track of what some people are posting on here and interact more directly. It’s easy enough to sort of keep up with some of the more prolific accounts because they’re often almost hard to avoid, but that’s about it.

As an example, I ran into a few people in a thread once that live nearby (statistically fairly unlikely!) and there was talk of meeting up, but that was the end of it, because how else could we coordinate? I can’t even find that thread now, but I’m still up for some beers, gorge residents!

Anyway, sorry, I’m rambling. Really I was just wondering if anyone has any good tools for following other HN users’ activity.

[pasquinelli]

i'd hate it personally. i've noticed recently that the comment threads i poke my head into have a different vibe, maybe in the last month or so. i had the thought last weekend that perhaps there are some people who've left twitter and are trying to get the fix they used to get there on other sites, like this one. it's a disturbing thought for me.

i like that the conversation is mostly between hn readers and the article they're commenting on, with crosstalk very much being secondary.

i would really hate hn becomming a social network. but that's me, i happen to hate those things.

[ilyt → pasquinelli]

Still, would be at least nice to get info in the top bar about whether someone answered to your comment, it's tiring going there manually

[nindalf → ilyt]

The emergent behaviour from lacking this feature is that often the main thread of a discussion involves multiple people instead of two people replying to each other instantaneously as soon as the notification comes in.

IMO two people sniping at each other at the speed of push notifications rarely leads to thoughtful discussion.

[ilyt → nindalf]

Neither does current behaviour, it's just annoyance. It also makes any longer term than say a day conversation be mighty annoying as it just on next, then next, then next page of the comments page.

> IMO two people sniping at each other at the speed of push notifications rarely leads to thoughtful discussion.

You can't answer immediately on HN anyway.

[fingerlocks → ilyt]

There’s an API and a ton of open source clients that will do that for you.

[nindalf]

By deemphasising the author, HN rewards good comments, regardless of who writes them. This is a good thing, and incentivises people to participate and write good comments. The following system you propose breaks this, because “famous” people would get upvotes as soon as they’re posted. Comments by the same famous people would rise to the top of every thread, reinforcing their fame.

We already have websites with these mechanics, notably Twitter. I don’t think we need to introduce them in HN comments.

[Animats]

I'm more interested in "what" than "who". The average level on HN is high enough that it's not necessary to have a system where you just follow a few "thought leaders". Unlike, say, Twitter or Reddit, where the most of the content is well below ChatGPT level.

[debaserab2]

There are some truly prolific posters here -- some that are reknown in their industry/academic fields and some that are simply great engineers / great writers -- I definitely notice a few certain usernames when they post and have often thought I would love to see any time they posted. It's truly a treat when they show up in a comment thread and offer insider knowledge that you can't learn anywhere elsewhere. In my opinion, it's probably the one thing that makes HN a cut above any other social media experience on the internet.

As much as I'd love a feature to follow a person like that, I suspect many of these people are the types that probably would be less likely to participate if they knew people were following them and I want to respect that and their privacy. Instead I've tried to remember to always favorite comments that stand out to me which I periodically revisit because they are like little nuggets of wisdom that I can continuously relearn from.

[themodelplumber]

There's this page which offers a "Users" posts and comments RSS feed.

https://hnrss.github.io/

Is that the kind of thing?

[stephen_g]

As a 3rd party tool, sure, or perhaps just for comments, but in general I don’t think it’s a good idea for the site. I feel like this was one of the first things that really started to kill Digg back in the day. Got to the point where it was easy for some users with huge numbers of followers to get stuff to the front page, but very difficult for everyone else…

[conesus]

Hacker Smacker (https://hackersmacker.org) is a browser extension I built to help with exactly this problem. It shows a colored or next every commenters name, signifying whether you friended them or foe’d them. And so it lets you read Hacker News natively and allows you to quickly scroll through comments, highlighting, commenters who you like, and filtering commenters who you previously have marked that you don’t like.

Makes quick work of comment threads. And if the people you’re following, also use hackers smacker, then their friends and foes will also be shown as side-by-side orbs.

[telotortium]

Don't forget https://hnreplies.com/, to get email notifications when someone replies to your comment.

[swyx]

i believe some people have written tooling to maintain a followlist and notify when a user you like posts somewhere, but i dont know what its called and dont use it myself (enough notifs in my life).

but no way youre gonna be able to get hn denizens to doxx their locations if they dont opt in even if they would love to meet and live next door

[fisherjeff → swyx]

Definitely not interested in asking people to post more personal info. I certainly don’t do it.

My point was more that it’d just be nice to have a way to continue off-topic interactions.

[akkartik]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34411933#34416655

[Ghoyome]

A solution already exists. Hnrss[1], just need an rss reader.

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

[pictur]

this is a site where comments are made with the same thoughts in every post. if you write something critical, you will be directly downvoted. for this reason, i do not think that the tracking feature is very much needed on a site where there are not many different opinions. because no matter which post you go to, you will see similar things.

[WA → pictur]

Simply not true. I witness enough threads with heated debates. I don’t even mean the occasional political stuff, but technical things as well.

For example, native vs Electron apps. The content might be always kinda similar, but there are clearly several camps and a lot of nuance in these discussions. Neither camp is downvoted.

[pictur → WA]

yes you are right. people who argue in the same way, talking about the same things.