One of the things I positively like about Hacker News is the complete lack of notifications or tools to make it easy to see when someone has replied to me.
Low comment/response velocity is what keeps it from turning into reddit IMO. Meaning, high velocity encourages arguments, negativity and other low value response posts which is what I see all over on Reddit.
I remember pg actively detecting when two users start replying to each other quickly on HN, and will throttle how quickly each both see the reply in the hopes of de-escalating.
I think he also found that as two people argued down a thread, their wall of text gets thinner and thinner, and more annoying to read, and hoped that was a deterrence as well.
The dynamics at play are the same. But people still behave differently in different environments. Just like the real world;
For example, Anonymity plays an outsized role in the equation. FB is as you said essentially the same as Reddit except (most) people self censor to a degree that keeps it mostly cordial. They’re not going to use certain language and allow their full opinions to be heard, because someone they actually know could be reading. (Some people don’t care and post unfiltered but speaking of the majority).
Generally People posting on LinkedIn is often going to be some form of HR speak, they don’t want to offend anyone in their professional network. They’re not going to talk about religion and politics and whatnot.
"people still behave differently in different environments."
Mostly I don't. Nearing my 7th decade, I have spent most of my adult life seeking convergence of my private and public self. It's one reason that since the early 90s I have used my initials as my username everywhere.
I highly value privacy but have no need of anonymity, though I understand it's life or death for too many.
And I don't mean I would be the same around a stranger as I am my wife of 35 years. I mean I would be my honest, authentic self for each context. Twitter or nestr, Facebook or Reddit, church or mall, my hometown USA or Berlin.
I rarely comment here because I rarely have any value to add.
I can relate with most of this. But I also know I have some unpopular opinions on certain matters. I will discuss on HN/Reddit - or even IRL if I'm talking to a stranger/someone where risk is low of it getting back to "core" network. In other environments, I'm likely to just keep silent on those opinions. Even then, in some environments (work/school/church), some topics are completely off limits and I won't even sit in silence (eg. if coworkers talk politics/religion I just physically leave the conversation).
I too feel I'm my true authentic self in each scenarios, I'm just calculating risk, disruption, impact to reputation, etc and can always choose silence as a safe option. Although, safe discussion on these topics is often the most interesting to me. It's controversial stuff where my opinions have reason 'to me' but I'm open to hearing other points of view. I don't see my thoughts as immutable so if some stranger on the internet says something I haven't considered, I might just change my way of thinking entirely.
eh - I think Hacker News is qualitatively different. There's a lot of shared values here, and low-effort comments are actively discouraged. It's a lot more pleasant to read the comments here than on a place like Reddit, even in some of the higher-functioning subs.
Maybe it's the way comments are weighted here, or the fact that post scores aren't shared, but it's definitely the best place on the web for me.
It's quantitatively different, not qualitatively different.
The non-contributors here here speak in full sentences, cite cherry picked links to back up their assertions of the local dogma and link to the Wikipedia page of whatever trope they want to reference rather than just stating it. These sorts of comments perform the same social utility (tribe signaling basically) to the people who peddle them as saying "yikes" and "the front fell off" on reddit and the snarky bigoted quips they use on the chans. Such non-contributions seem to be of roughly the same prevalence on all platforms, ours are just the most polished.
Well, I guess having different phylosophies and different flows/features is what makes some products more palatable.
On the other hand, I really would not mind notifications for replies to my posts, and I don't think they would negatively impact my HN experience. What I like about HN is mostly the community, the content, reading the comments, the UX/UI comes quite behind.
One of the issues with both is that there’s an invisible timer countdown until the point were any reply becomes unseen. On web forums I like to wait a few days before responding, to judge whether or not a response is actually worth the time and will result in a productive conversation. On places like Reddit and Hacker News we don’t have this option - a person usually has a couple of hours, at most a day or two before any reply on the site would be as effective as writing a reply on a paper note and burning it afterwards.
Plenty of times I've received replies to comments that were themselves replies to posts that were a fair number of days old.
It depends on how often that person visits HN, how busy is their "threads" timeline and how deeply they go into it. Then, finally, whether or not your comment requires or provokes a response.
It can happen, but after a few hours it’s _extremely_ rare for people to read comments. If you’re an infrequent commentator, you’ll notice this. You’re almost never going to see your points change if you haven’t made a comment that day. On the rare occasion it does happen, it’s going to be one point for a post made in the past week.
Your reply actually made me curious and I logged into an old Hacker News account that I hadn’t used in a few years. Hundreds of comments on that account, many that had a very positive responses (thousands of total points). Yet not a single point was given since I switched accounts, likely because close to no one has read any of those comments since they were made.
On web forums it’s not unusual for me to get replies and reactions for comments that were made a decade ago.
I have found that it forgets about me, after a while, so I stopped using it.
Every now and then, one of my downvote stalkers likes to go to an old comment I made, and write an insult. I assume that because the comment is so old, the post defies the Banhammer.
I don't mind missing those, and I guess it makes them feel better about themselves, so it's all good.
Yeah weirdly I also think that's a good feature to be missing. If we had this we'd definitely see more comments and engagement, but I don't think it would be better. Getting an instant audio-visual notification (i.e. you keep the tab open, see a "(1)" appended to the title of the tab and you hear a little *ping!*) during more heated discussions would diminish the "cooldown" period where you have a couple of minutes to step back and think "do I really need to reply...?" We have enough of this kind of discussion already, if I'm honest I'm no stranger to them :)
Well, for me I don't want anything like that. I think the site works better without becoming like other sites with all the bells and whistles. But each to his own.
Tbf he just didn’t mention the reason he liked it, but to me it’s obvious. When you don’t have near real time notifications of replies or any at all, there’s much less of a chance for a flame war
Did something change on HN that users had to be conditioned to accept?
No. It's a simply a different experience that is one among many that people continue to engage in. It's not like users "condition" themselves to only use HN.
One is https://alerthn.com that does full text search on topics and commenets. It works great for years.
The other is http://www.hnreplies.com/ and it sends email on replies to your comments. It works good, but it stops after some time but you can subscribe again.
So this will not show me replies to my comments, it is just showing comments with different layout? It's not very clear from title and description.
I am following my comments through threads button in top, though it's not so easy to notice which have new reply and everything need to be checked manually.
https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=petodo
I wish there was some service where you enter your HN username and it would show you newest replies to all your comments.
A consequence of the current system is that it's impractical for an active user to have long-running conversations. As soon as a comment of mine has scrolled off the first page of threads, i'll almost never see a reply to it.
I would want to be very confident that this was a bad thing before "fixing" it. HN's current culture must inevitably be shaped by this effect. How would it change if it was removed? I'm not sure i want HN to become another forum where pairs of people get into long back-and-forths.
I don't see how hntoast is going to address this problem. Say someone just replied to a comment of mine I made a month ago. Where do I see it?
The user interface you need to solve that problem is to be able to put in your user ID to see a timeline of all replies to any of your items whatsoever, not replies to a specific post.
> The user interface you need to solve that problem is to be able to put in your user ID to see a timeline of all replies to any of your items whatsoever, not replies to a specific post.
Or, as petodo put it in the comment i was replying to:
> some service where you enter your HN username and it would show you newest replies to all your comments.
I like that HN didn’t act like other forums where 2 commentators go on a long threaded discussion. I like the fact that other people pick up the idea and carry it in the comments.
If HNers wanted notifications they would’ve implemented it in the last decade.
A tiny nit - computers are good at things, so the input box could easily take either a post id - eg 34520664 - or, for ease of use, the whole url - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34520664 - and then do the trivial string manipulation to extract out the id.
Saves the bit of friction going copying address bar to using hntoast.
Good stuff. Fonts could be a rendered a little bigger. Also, allow me to choose a handful of themes for better display spacing, minimal coloring between comments for better readability?
Note that hnreplies asks not for a comment ID, but for your user ID. You get notified when someone replies to you in any thread whatsoever. You don't have to continuously monitor specific threads. That's the point.
Say I'm involved in 17 recent threads, in any of which there can be new replies. Do I have to bookmark 17 hntoast URLs and monitor them?
Or what if, today, someone replies to something I wrote in 2019? [Edit: that won't be possible; HN doesn't allow necroposting!]
