Ask HN: ‘Following’ Other HN Users?

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.

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 · 3 years ago

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 · 3 years ago

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.

fingerlocks · 3 years ago

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

pasquinelli · 3 years ago

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 · 3 years ago

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 · 3 years ago

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 · 3 years ago

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 · 3 years ago

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 · 3 years ago

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 · 3 years ago

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