

Ask YC: Follow users on HN? - wumi

Dismissing the potential twitter analogies that will certainly arise, this would be an interesting feature to follow submissions, comments, and threads of one's favorite users.<p>I'm sure many would be (or probably are manually) following PG and others on the top 100, but it would help create quasi-groups of interest -- say a certain user is consistently submitting articles on a subject of interest --, without filtering the community at large.<p>Thoughts and comments?
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izaidi
I started making a simple app that scrapes your (or any other user's) HN
activity and turns it into an RSS feed, but I didn't finish it, partly because
I don't post here much. Following multiple users is a cool idea that didn't
occur to me, though, and RSS would make that sort of thing a cinch, so I might
pick it up again.

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alaskamiller
We've built this already:

<http://searchyc.com/user/izaidi?sort=by_date>

<http://rss.searchyc.com/user/izaidi?sort=by_date>

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xirium
Also see [http://www.ycombinator.search.xirium.com/cgi-
bin/search.cgi?...](http://www.ycombinator.search.xirium.com/cgi-
bin/search.cgi?p=0&q=-alleyinsider.com+-nytimes.com+-slashdot.org+-techcrunch.com+-valleywag.com)
to exclude items before making a custom RSS feed.

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alaskamiller
Sounds like a buddy list on a web forum/message board. A couple days ago
someone wanted to add avatars. Next week maybe we should just replace this
whole thing with vBulletin.

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epi0Bauqu
I did not want avatars per se, though they would have probably fulfilled my
request. All I was asking for was _some_ pictorial cue to better associate
user names with their set of comments. It could be randomly generated. It is a
memory thing.

That being said, humans have evolved to remember faces at a very intricate and
ingrained level, so perhaps faces would be best. In any case, I said "pictures
next to user names," not avatars.

What I was looking for seemed to get lost in peoples' emotional reactions to
digg and other social networking sites, as they are here.

Once you know you like submissions/comments of certain users, I think it would
nice to be able to follow them more easily than going through each, one by
one, manually. I think this could be done very differently than a _buddy list_
, e.g. an RSS feed or the exact same interface filtered with those users or
somehow promoting them.

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shaunxcode
someone should download the periodic backups and analyze all posters
contributions (setting up synonyms, word-topic groupings etc.) and thus
associate a user with an image based off a google image search + grease monkey
script for hn. You would obviously want to avoid using the same image twice.
You could keep a record of the past images associated with that user as a way
to visualize their shift in interests etc. But that would fit your needs with
out turning it into a way for people to "express themselves man".

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jauco
<http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=wumi> replace wumi with pg or rms or
whomever.

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wumi
certainly, but was just considering a favorites or saved of some sort, even if
it's internal like my saved subs i've upmodded.

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Tichy
As a fun project, one could mirror hacker news on Twitter...

