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.
I really like the lack of push notifications. Sometimes I'll make a reply during my morning coffee, do some work, then check back in the afternoon to find hundreds of replies and deep threaded discussion. The sense of pride I get from being able to start a healthy thread without more participation is opposed to the jacking of the nervous system dang is reflecting on. In some way, it builds my confidence in this community.
I agree too. I am able to comment and add to a thread without feeling like I have to then defend my opinion or go back and answer replies. There's no responsibility, in a way, with commenting. I can add an anecdote, or ask a rhetorical question, or even crack a joke, and then move on with my curiosity. It's a good system, and makes it feel very calm here.
What makes a forum interesting IMO is the back and forth discussion that sometimes happens, as long as it's respectful and productive. If you don't occasionally check and answer replies, you'd miss out on the chance of having your opinion challenged and having to defend or amend it, which is a good opportunity for growth. Otherwise it's akin to throwing your thoughts into the well and walking away. You might as well do that on Twitter and turn off notifications.
I do think HN should have a simple notification system, with a configurable period of up to, say, a week after posting, and having the ability to mute threads. Just so that you don't miss any initial discussion on new posts, but without feeling overwhelmed or distracted by posts that are no longer news.
You also "miss the opportunity" to engage in an endless, repetitive non-constructive back-and-forth which is much more common than a back-and-forth-of-personal-intellectual-growth. It's hard to believe notifications (rather than, say, deliberate personal interest and effort) would help drive the latter while we know for a fact they help generate a lot of the former.
> You also "miss the opportunity" to engage in an endless, repetitive non-constructive back-and-forth which is much more common than a back-and-forth-of-personal-intellectual-growth.
On other forums maybe, but I haven't experienced much of that here.
Regardless, this is clearly something _some_ users want, so that we can avoid wasting time manually hunting for new replies. For those who don't, it can be an optional feature and they wouldn't have to use it.
Sure but those users have the many options outlined in this very thread. There's also 'threads' in the top navbar which covers the basic use case reasonably well - I'm just mentioning in case you or others missed it, like I miss all sorts of weird cryptic HN features after 10+ years here.
"threads" is a simple notification system, imo. That's how I follow up on discussions. It also naturally ages my attention on topics. I'm not going to be responding to three day old discussions that I've chosen in one way or another to move on from.
Absolutely. And if I feel like it and I have time I can pop back into that thread but I rarely find myself becoming engaged with it more than once or twice. Unlike some websites where I've gone back and forth for days with some moron about which one of us is right. ;)
I'm always pleasantly surprised to show up at the end of the day, click through my posts, and see thoughtful replies. I rarely have the time to back-and-forth in a thread - push notifications would probably just discourage me from ever posting. But... seeing some replies or upvotes for something I wrote the previous day - that's always a nice "Hey - thanks for sharing" that I don't feel compelled to reply to as the day has already passed.
Yeah as a reddit troll myself I enjoy the freedom of never caring and pursuing flaming here... people like me get addicted to the reaction and start writing only to trigger reactions. Here at least I post constructively sometimes.
It's a beautifully quiet design. If I want to check if someone came back I can, and sometimes I don't have the energy to look. The quality is the effect of all these little things, and not something one could affect top down in another design.
I suspect there is a ton of sophisticated stuff going on behind the scenes, but even if there were, the effect is still too good to complain about.
If you use traditional social media such as facebook/instagram/twitter/etc on a mobile device, the best thing you can possibly do in android 9 or later is to disable all forms of push notification for the entire app. Not just in the app's settings but at the operating system level.
Anything that would generate a notification requiring a swipe-down from the top of the screen, or making a noise, seeing what the notification is and either clicking on it or swiping it away, disable that entirely.
I also allow exactly zero websites to send push notifications via browser on my desktop/laptop workstation systems.
I agree. My preference is not to have any reply notifications. Most of the time the comments or article have aged out of view within a day or two, and no new comments are being posted there anyways.
If it is something important and could be positive, you could always try contacting the poster directly if they have an email on their profile.
Participants in a subthread might not even look again so default action is no reply. This is a great feature because it allows non-constructive subthreads to fade away with ease. Notifications would change this whole dynamic.
That you have to use one of what ...a dozen[ish] options I've seen posted today to get to what is a fundamentally standard part of every forum experience (except this one) shows how out of touch the HN devs are, imo
They aren't out of touch, they understand the culture. People here want Hacker News to feel like the last thirty years of the web didn't happen. They don't want Hacker News to be modern, least of all to be like other forums. They want the Bohemian indulgence of 90's era web ugliness with complete disregard for standards, and the ascetic purity of painfully minimalist UX that appeals to their contrarian, anti-modern sensibilities.
The design is based directly on the design of several (what we now call) 'Web 2.0' sites so the idea it's a sop to the retro-hipster sensibilities of 90's-longing users itself feels like a bit of an overwrought personal indulgence.
“So the most important thing a community site can do is attract the kind of people it wants. A site trying to be as big as possible wants to attract everyone. But a site aiming at a particular subset of users has to attract just those—and just as importantly, repel everyone else. I've made a conscious effort to do this on HN. The graphic design is as plain as possible, and the site rules discourage dramatic link titles. The goal is that the only thing to interest someone arriving at HN for the first time should be the ideas expressed there”
I mean, you only have to read literally any thread on HN's design and features, or any of the nigh-weekly threads complaining about the modern web and its complexity, how commodification and capitalism have ruined its creativity and quirkiness, or how javascript exists, to see those sensibilities are alive and well and strongly culturally correlated to the layout of this site and the perception (somewhat inaccurate) that it exists frozen in amber.
None of this says 'ignore standards and the web of the last 30 years'. Some of this stuff was, again, literal web 2.0 shit. Yes, sure, that line of thinking exists here culturally but even its origin is a decade (i.e. a millennium, in web time) off from your original bit of hyperbole.
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.
you are pretty much guaranteed not to see replieds to older comments.
I consider this a feature, not a bug. IMO, it's good to let older conversations just kinda "run out of steam" as attention moves elsewhere. In my experience, extended discussions here tend to be unproductive flame-war level discussion. I don't see any value in making it easier to sustain that.
This is one of my own frustrations with HN. The issue isn't quite as bad as on other discussion sites, but generally, conversations ... fade quickly. I'd like to see some kind of mechanism which works against this tendency.
That said, notifications of themselves ... probably aren't that. Though there might be ways to tweak the mechanic to induce this.
Google+ had a Notifications dynamic that seemed to work well in this effect, though it was somewhat specific to how that site was structured:
- Notifications were for specific discussions.
- Disucssions were hosted by a specific user.
- The Notification went out to all (recent-ish) participants in the discussion.
- Discussion hosts could moderate the thread. This was a two-edged sword, but tended to reduce spam and flamebait when used well.
- The Notifications Pane itself wasn't merely a "something happened" nag, but a site element where new comments could be directly responded to.
- Discussion threads were flat, with most-recent comments appearing at the bottom of the thread. I'd at first missed the threaded style, but came to appreciate a flat disucssion which didn't descend into long separated exchanges (frequently flamefests), and for which each subsequent response was an equal contribution to the thread.
- Total thread length was limited to 500 replies.
It's not the same as a topical or open-discussion formum, as with HN. But as a conversation-fostering platform given the right host and participants it could and often did work quite well.
A result was conversations which evolved naturally over days and weeks, sometimes months and years. Conversations didn't simply die.
I agree about the problem of quality conversations fading too quickly.
Perhaps HN could add a /topconversations or /yesterdayconversations link that only highlights the best conversation threads from 24 hours ago. That way attention on good discussions could be maintained for an extra day.
I meant "conversations" and not posts. Kinda like https://news.ycombinator.com/bestcomments but highlight the ones that have the best overall cluster of comments in a continuous thread
I’ve replied to multiple days old comments and been replied to in turn.
I think when you do this you’re not performing for an audience but responding to another person or couple of people individually. The fact not many people are going to see it should be irrelevant - is a piece of art (or a notebook doodle) not worth doing because it has an audience of one?
I didn't phrase it correctly. What I meant was, I want to continue an old comment thread, but then I wonder if its worth doing since the other party probably isn't going to respond or even know that I replied.
> I consider this a feature, not a bug. IMO, it's good to let older conversations just kinda "run out of steam" as attention moves elsewhere.
That tends to happen even when there are notifications in my experience - it only takes one participant to stop.
> In my experience, extended discussions here tend to be unproductive flame-war level discussion.
As in here on HN? That can hardly be due to notifications since there are none. I'm also not looking for extended discussion, just being able to see if someone has something to add to an old comment of mine.
> As in here on HN? That can hardly be due to notifications since there are none.
I’ve certainly felt that was happening here a few times. I’m glad the “threads” list is so short, because I’m not immune to the siren call of https://xkcd.com/386 even though my better self wishes I were.
Maybe a way then to flag a comment to watch for a response? Sometimes I ask a question I'd love answered, or if someone else responds to a conversation I think is important - I'd be happy if they eventually replied.
You could also do some sort of “Tell HN: this is why I moved from tech to law and back” post, although it does seem like the site penalizes those sort of posts so it might not be very visible either.
Im not sure i agree with that. old forums used to have interesting threads that would go on for a while and in depth. One thing I dont like about this, idk what this is called, new generation of message board?, is that past 3 or 4 comments deep everything dies and past like 12 hours commenting dies. it actually feels a lot more shallow
I suspect that may be a result of those boards being more specifically focused on a particular topic. But, that's just a hunch, not something I can prove.
Honestly it's hilarious how much attention this is getting. It's a link that took me several years to find. It's the second link on the page. And a bunch of IT pros are delighted to find it!
Ux is hard. Personally, I had clicked the "comments" link and it was not what I was looking for, and then it took a moment of curiosity several years later to try again. I think the moral of the story is, if you want something to be discoverable, don't hide it behind a less obvious naming choice when the more obvious looking choice is used nearby. But who knows.
I use Glider (from F-Droid) on mobile for browsing HN. On desktop, I use the normal website. Thus, the link is useful for me when on desktop. It's not a thing in Glider.
I use the Threads link to see recent conversations. Replies can only come in for two weeks (IIRC), and 99% of replies happen within 24 hours, in my experience.
I'm less curious about late replies than I am about late upvotes. Sometimes karma ticks upward and I can't figure out what people liked. It'd be nice to be able to figure this out — does anyone know if any of the browser plugins offer such a functionality?
An edge case like that isn't really the point. I mean, what percentage of "responses to old comments" fall into that bucket? My guess is that it's a very small percentage. Weighed against the "propagating / encouraging low-value flame wars" possibility, I absolutely consider the lack of such notifications to a Good Thing.
Especially considering somebody who's particularly motivated to find delayed answers to specific questions can always bookmark the particular comment and check it manually, or just occasionally scroll-back through the "threads" page or whatever. If they're not motivated enough to do that, then maybe the discussion wasn't that important to begin with.
Since "low-value flame wars" are already explicitly against the community guidelines, using that as the argument against notifications is like banning knives because they are potential murder weapons. And then having people defend that decision as a "good thing" that we can't cut vegetables.
You can already flag inappropriate content. We don't have to fear it.
If I actually still need an answer to the question, I'll be checking my threads. Otherwise, I'd prefer not to be interrupted by someone's nitpicking a point I made about wastewater management three days ago or something; it's unnecessary stress. I find reddit's reply notifications to be a stressful anti-feature, and they're a primary reason that reddit is IP-blocked on my work laptop while HN is not.
Because conversations have lifespans. If I want to see said answer I can visit my profile and check. But I don't want the website constantly pestering me "someone responded to that thing you said a week ago!"
If I'm still curious of the answer a few days later I can check my profile a few days later
Why not make subscribing to a thread manual? You can subscribe to a thread of you think it is important. The subscription will last for 3-4 days or maybe a week. Someone will probably make a client that automatically subscribes you to your comments. But that will probably be a vanishingly small number of users. And flame wars would require both sides of the war to have their subscription on. The notifications themselves can be delayed too, so you can either manually follow it to stay fully up to date or deal with a few minutes or hours of delays.
Basically too inconvenient for a troll, but usable for most probably productive purposes.
Philosophers have been answering, or at least asking, the same questions for centuries and millennia. Technical and scientific questions can span years or decades. Political and social ones, decades and centuries.
No, it's not necessary to drag all of past discourse into each individual conversation. But neither is it reasonable to demand that all discussions die within a few hours, or a day at the outside, on the most perfect text-based global communications platform ever developed.
HN is not for directly communicating with single people. HN is for conversations with a large community. By commenting you can discover and/or influence the collective opinions of a large number of people. But that only works while the community's attention is on a discussion. Once the community moves on, there's no point in continuing a discussion here.
Move 1:1 conversations to another service. Many people put contact information in their profiles, and others can often be found with a little searching. I've had a few people contact me about HN conversations over email and twitter and it's been a generally positive experience. Maybe HN should do more to encourage people to include contact information in their profiles so that this can happen more often.
As an ccasional replier, that's a plus for me.
If I am interested in the past, I can go look (and I have done), and then reply.
Look forward to reading your reply....perhaps in a couple of months.
It mostly does the opposite because it means getting replies quickly tapers off. After a few days the odds of keeping up a discussion are low, and older discussions are baiscally locked out forever.
Look at any post that gets a significant number of comments and then scroll to pick out the deepest threads. When the depth comes from lots of people adding information or opinions, the quality is generally pretty high. When the depth comes from a small number of people going back-and-forth, it’s usually not very interesting.
Adding more of the latter type would make HN worse and that’s what you would get more of if they made HN work more like Reddit.
> Reducing back-and-forth discussions is a feature.
So your opinion is that discussions are bad.
> When the depth comes from lots of people adding information or opinions, the quality is generally pretty high.
That's not a discussion that’s a lot if people broadcasting into the void (it’s also not true, if lots of people are replying to the same comment they’re usually adding identical or strongly overlapping information on a relatively basic subject).
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.
I use a custom style sheet to hide my karma score (except on user profile page where I can go if I'm super curious). It's broke an unhealthy cycle I would subconsciously try to craft the perfect reply and get an addiction-inducing high from some big karma boost. Or big productivity-killing negative response.
Yeah, I can imagine that'd be good for many people. I get no thrill out of my karma. To me it's just a signal that something I said got attention and that I might want to quickly glance at my comments page in case there's an opportunity to engage with someone. The number itself is pretty meaningless and doesn't drive me to HN.
Same here! Down to a T. I actually think the consideration to hide it came from the fact that everyone *else's* votes are hidden.
Incidentally, rather than a custom style sheet to hide the score, I have the entire top bar set to the karma color. This means I cannot see any of the actual links, and I have to really squint at the screen and hunt for them. Long-tail accessibility issues seem part of HN's brand, or something ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Me too, as of a month or so ago. So far it has been an improvement in my experience with HN. I wouldn't mind this being a toggle on the configuration screen.
uBlock Origin filters are good for this. I also hide scores on Reddit and likes on Twitter in an attempt to not be influenced by what the mob thinks of comment X as well as the reason you mentioned. Unfortunately, it is one click away to un-hide so that second intent is mostly a failure, I end up checking anyway.
I've had an ... interesting ... experience having made the Leaders page, and at one point suggested to dang that the feature might be removed.
I later heard from someone else who'd made the list and had somewhat similar responses to it.
HN reduces gamification in most respects, but not all, and even in the ones that remain the psychological impacts are interesting.
Yesterday's Black Bar for example. It's a subtle note, but I immediately knew what it meant (and that there would be inevitable questions about its meaning).
I have thought for some time that votes should come in two flavors. X if you make a comment, X/10 if you don't. Drive-by voting is of little value, and for abusive posts that need downvoting we have flagging to accomplish quick removal. Giving more weight to people who write a reply would encourage more conversation.
Of course, then there is a question of whether it would encourage more thoughtful comments or not, and I cannot answer that.
Allowing comments on a news aggregator doesn't mean it's a forum. The fact that HN purposely doesn't have much of the standard functionality of a forum should clue you in to the fact that it isn't one.
Collaborative filtering ... has issues. Most simple or single-factor fixes don't address the larger problems.
Much of the time, it tends to amplify interesting, and diminish nonproductive contributions. Spam, trolling, clickbait, and vacuous responses seem to get quickly downvoted and flagged on HN, which is good. Comment voting has numerous other connotations, however.
- Simple and short expressions tend to be disproportionately upvoted. They're easier to assess. Sometimes they are insightful, most often, only tapping a common sentiment.
- Controversial views tend to be downvoted. Sometimes controversy is flamebait, sometimes it isn't. There's not much distinction made between the two.
- Truth isn't a popularity contest. HN often, but not always, avoids this trap. True expertise in complex topics is rare, but at times necessary. An epistemic system should reflect this to a greater extent (though also be aware of misuses of such claims of expertise or authority).
- Topics strongly shaped by remunerative interests, ideological alignments, and tribal allegiances tend to perform most poorly under popular voting systems. There is a List of Things HN Cannot Discuss, and most of these seem to fall under this umbrella. Dang has voiced frustration with this on occasion, and I've had numerous email discussions with him about this ... more in the past than recently, I think. HN is guided to an extent by its moderator team. It is not directly steered by them. And the overall philosophy is broader than critics of the principle current political tribes seem to admit.
Collaborative filtering / the wisdom of crowds was all the rage in the late 1990s / early 2000s. Whilst it has some uses, there's been an overreliance on it.
I'm not entirely sure how best to patch the system, though I have some thoughts.
- Bounding ratings to a range rather than a simple sum seems more useful.
- Weighting individual's ratings by their own assigned mean similarly. If someone always hands out 5s (on a 1--5 scale), then those are re-scaled to a median score. Rescaling ranges similarly: someone offering only 1s and 5s might see that rescaled to 2 & 4 repectively.
- Factoring in expertise, or rescaling based on other factors such as truth, tone, conciseness, accuracy, references, etc., might help. Goodhart's law applies. But sometimes, what you want isn't the average opinion of the passengers, but a competent pilot.
Another point is that HN doesn't aim simply to be a place where truth is sought, but a conversational platform. Excessive strictness would probably diminish this.
I use hnreplies and quite like it. Another option is https://hnrss.github.io/#reply-feeds which gives you a feed of replies to a user (quite possibly yourself). The RSS option is of course more flexible because you can do whatever you want with the feed but I just read my RSS via email anyways so I just use hnreplies. IIUC it is also faster because it is polling for everyone quite frequently whereas individually polling the RSS feed I would probably do it at a lower interval.
I don't there's anything deliberately evil about it, it just happens to be effectively credentials harvesting - your auth cookie ends up on someone else's server. If they get compromised, all those HN accounts get compromised. Some people might be ok with that risk, if aware of it.
And Scott 'sctb' Bell. Don't think he comments as much though (at least, that I notice/in threads I read). (Oh or actually.. not active since 2019? Maybe you're right.)
That parent one is super useful! Sometimes I go too deep in a discussion and realize I don't want to be there but can't find my way back easily by eyeballing the indent depth of the comments.
I find them very useful. Whenever I've gone deep enough in a comment thread, I use the "parent" link to navigate to its root, and then I either collapse it or use the "next" link to read the next thread.
>Most are so subtle you wouldn't notice, and that's the point.
That can't be the point. There's no reason to introduce new features with the expectation that no one will ever notice or use them. Honestly, I think this forum cargo-cults its "minimalist" aesthetic far too much.
Obviously GP comment is saying you don't notice because the changes integrate so well into the existing system, not saying it's desirable for users to literally not notice the features. Otherwise the maintainers of HN are morons introducing features that no one will use.
Honestly... nitpicking comments with some dumb hyper-literal interpretation to find something tiny and pointless to disagree about is an aspect of HN I could do without.
> Obviously he's saying you don't notice because the changes integrate so well into the existing system.
Yes, to the point that people literally never notice them, which is (or should be considered) a problem. People still complain that HN lacks thread folding, even though the feature's been deployed for months. They don't see the links or never bother clicking them. People have been here for years and never noticed the site has a footer with links to other features.
That's not a feature of elegant integration, it's the fault of a purposely obscurant layout.
>Nitpicking comments to find something tiny and pointless to disagree about is an aspect of HN I could do without.
As is the assumption that all criticism of HN and its features is pointless nitpicking. Be less defensive.
Sorry, missed your comment (haha). I don't recall it in full detail, but just remembered it look like a more modern UI with rounded corners and more padding. But still the same colors and functionalities.
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.
>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'm sure I "could" do that myself - but why waste my time when it's something so incredibly trivial to add to the site so everyone benefits?
Intentionally breaking the pattern of internet fora by withholding this feature seems ...
Intentionally breaking the pattern of internet fora by withholding this feature seems
Saying that the HN devs are "withholding" a feature implies that you think you're entitled to their development time, QA time, support, etc. You aren't.
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.
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)
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.
The default is not, as explained in the FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html. But we turn them on whenever we see a case that isn't abusive. I don't know of a way to automate that.
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.
I don't so much care about something being upvoted (it's all fake internet points anyway), but knowing when someone comments back would be quite valuable
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.
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.
I'm not on safari (or Mac), so I can't try it. But what I usually do is collapse the comments I already read, and when I check the thread later, I can distinguish new (or previously unread) comments.
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
>And no one has (as of 1133 EST 17-Feb-2022) provided a real answer for why HN has such an obvious feature missing :)
This kind of reply is exactly the reason I'm glad that HN does not have reply notifications. At least a dozen people have clearly explained that they prefer HN without reply notifications, but you're here offering a troll-ish claim of "no real answer" with a correspondingly sarcastic emoticon.
If HN functioned like a normal internet forum, ie it had reply notifications, then if/when someone actually posted why HN has intentionally decided to break the pattern would've popped up as something findable
It's the same reason dang needs to manually tell people about 'more' in long threads, or repost previous discussion of the same topic. That was the initial design and no one wants to make new changes because of an absurd idealization of that design.
No one wants to rethink old decisions made a long time ago and genuinely wonder if things need to change. Hence people come up with bullshit defences.
'more' links for long threads wasn't HN's initial design. It's a performance workaround and therefore bs in its own right. I'm slowly making progress on a reimplementation of Arc, which will hopefully allow this to go away.
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.
I don't think they're asking for notifications. Even just an icon next to my profile name to indicate someone has responded to a comment would be something. And make it opt-in since a lot of people here seem to be happy with the status quo.
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.
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.
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.
I work on the code every day! or at least if I don't, it's a bad day.
There are a lot of changes, just mostly not visible, or only subtly visible. That's on purpose, because (a) users hate design changes and (b) pg-style minimalism is encoded into the DNA and it would be a mistake to mess with that.
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 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.
There's nothing in the HN UI that I've yet noticed that shows when a comment is upvoted (or downvoted) beyond the fake internet points counter next to my username
Up/down votes are irrelevant, though, in this context: if I've asked a question, I shouldn't have to go hunting to find out if people replied (or if they've asked something back, etc)
I don't write so many comments so I can always keep track of everything. Also, HN creates contextual threads for comments, the ones involving you, and I haven't had any bad UX to report so far. The system in its current form works.
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.
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":
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.
This was not a reply to what you said. It is a real-life example of how evil notification can be. Probably the most extreme example I have ever seen.
As for your comment, I understand. I went 11 days before posting the above reply. I was really busy with work. Frankly, I appreciate that HN does not have notifications. Most of what we all discuss in online forums, going back to my days on USENET, isn't important enough to consume the clock cycles. Notifications would just make us waste more time.
Yes, I am calling most of it a waste of time. If I was pressed to pick a number I would say that 1% to 5% might have some value. This might sound harsh. Take it as one person's opinion, which means it has little value and isn't at all relevant to your own context.
Thanks for the tip, I just installed (via MELPA), added it as a secondary select method, and restarted Gnus. I can see the "groups" show up, but when I try to enter them I get
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.
There are people from different types of technical (or not!) backgrounds in all stages of their careers here. Your litmus test for who is correctly "on HN" seems unnecessarily exclusionary. I'm not sure if you meant it to come across like that.
It probably did come out wrong. The point is that those people need to have enough motivation to stay and put up with the difficulty of using the site. This might seem counter-intuitive, but I'm convinced the quality of discussions can be proportional to the user hostility of the website :). See Reddit, Facebook, etc.
An automated mechanism of getting instant replies would create flame wars much more easily too.
In your opinion not knowing when a response occurs improves "discussion quality"
Objectively, it reduces the opportunity for "discussion" - since you don't know someone is actually having a "discussion" (or trying to have one) with you
Whether that correlates to better or worse "quality" is highly debatable :)
From replies, it seems that most people prefer it that way, so I wouldn't say it is _highly_ debatable. It appears to be different from your preference and that's about all.
It is highly debatable - that some people happen to think letting conversations die because they can't find when someone is trying to engage them is ... certainly a different way of interacting with the world than is normal
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