
Remind HN: Followups are impossible if you have no contact details - ColinWright
One of the things I do on HN is look up previous discussions.  When doing so I deliberately keep my search terms open and under-specified, because in that way I regularly and frequently turn up related items that turn out to be of interest.<p>Many times I want to follow up on the discussion, to recount more up-to-date experiences, or to find out what happened so I can share in any discoveries made.  People so often learn things, and so rarely come back to share them.<p>But very few people have any contact details in their profiles.  I&#x27;ve not been gathering data explicitly, but this submission is prompted by the frustration of wanting to help, wanting to share my experiences and&#x2F;or expertise, wanting to respond to a request for assistance, or wanting to find out how things turned out, and being unable to.<p>I know people are concerned about exposing email addresses, etc., but I get virtually no spam to the HN visible email address, and what little I get is more than out-weighed by the emails I get from the HN community.<p>Sometimes people think they have shared their address when in fact they haven&#x27;t. The &quot;email&quot; field is not visible to others, it needs to be in the box of text.<p>Do you share your email?  Have you explicitly listed contact details in your profile?
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scoot
Reddit style reply notifications might be helpful. It's easy to miss a reply
to ones own comments. Knowing this is true for others discourages revisiting
an old discussion with new learning and insight, as it won't be seen by those
involved in the original conversation, never mind a wider audience.

~~~
joefreeman
I understand that notifications could be helpful in some cases, but I actually
like the fact that people don't get notified when someone replies to their
comment, and I had assumed this was deliberate. It seems to make debates more
objective. For example, if user A makes a statement, and then B disagrees, I
like the fact that C can come along and backup A's points, rather than a
defensive response from A. (Having notifications that were delayed by an hour
or so might make for a good middle ground.)

~~~
brudgers
My understanding is that it, no automatic notification of replies, is
deliberate and the reason is to avoid stimulating flame wars. As someone who
posts a lot and usually tries to avoid flame wars, the first thing I do on any
site is turn off email notifications. If I care, I look at the threading of my
comments.

~~~
krapp
Preventing 'flame wars' by making conversations more awkward and difficult to
follow as time goes on just seems to create friction for everyone. And it
doesn't prevent flame wars - people who are emotionally invested in an
argument will follow a thread on their own accord. We've all seen them, i'm
kind of ashamed to say i've participated in a few.

But, notifications could be opt in by default and opt out by choice, and they
wouldn't necessarily have to be by email - you could be shown the last few
replies to your comments in your account.

~~~
qu4z-2
Just to clarify terms here, "opt-in" means disabled by default, with user
action needed to enable the feature. "opt-out" means on-by-default with the
ability to disable it: exactly the situation you describe. At least, that's my
understanding.

~~~
krapp
I may have misstated, then.. I meant that by default, you wouldn't get any
notifications unless you chose to, and if you did, you could turn them off at
any time.

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zupa-hu
I think an explanation next to all fields on the personal settings page would
be great.

For example, when I first landed there, noprocrast just made me feel like an
outsider. What the heck is that? Okay, english is not my mother-tongue, I
didn't even know the word procrastination. Let's add some entrepreneur
thinking: if I don't know what it means, nobody does! ^^

~~~
a3n
This is probably the best proposed, and least intrusive, solution to what may
or may not be a problem.

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dang
It's probably not the sort of thing that should be formalized, yet I feel that
HN could be bringing people together more than it currently does. I wonder
what new things could be tried.

~~~
karmacondon
Adding a new profile field that says "contact email (optional)" seems like it
might actually help a lot.

~~~
panic
Or even just a check box to make the already-provided email public.

~~~
toomuchtodo
Agreed!

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jacquesm
I've seen periodic rashes of emails from people with proposals or trying to
promote stuff with generic emails I'm not even remotely interested in that I
can trace back to my address being scraped from HN, this is a pity because it
made me consider removing my contact details. I have no problem with personal
approaches but the 'hustlers and growth hackers' can get on your nerves.

The large number of online and in-real-life friends I've made here ensured
that it is still up and will stay up without any obfuscation or other
gimmicks.

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iwwr
Maybe HN needs a basic personal messaging system?

~~~
lewisl9029
I'd like to see this as an alternative.

This post prompted me to add a contact email (obfuscated to hopefully guard
against automated scraping), but we really shouldn't have to do this.

~~~
tomjen3
I have had a contact email for a very long time, but I haven't noticed any
spam on it (gmail seems to have a great filter).

That said I have received a few emails that were the result of HN comments so
I would strongly suggest adding one in.

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nfm
Yes, I had no idea the email field isn't publicly visible. Thanks for the
heads up :)

~~~
dhimes
Me, too. And I've been here twice as long!

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dorfsmay
Hijiking this thread, since mine got no traction...

What would also be great is if HN provided a field to add our public keys.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9359536](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9359536)

In the meantime, if you put a website in your profile, add your public key
somewhere in there.

~~~
brudgers
I've seen them in people's profile.

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EGreg
Would anyone be interested if I made "profiles and notifications" for HN ...
and you could follow people or topics?

I registered the domain name [http://show.hn](http://show.hn) for just such an
idea.

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dragonwriter
> Many times I want to follow up on the discussion, to recount more up-to-date
> experiences, or to find out what happened so I can share in any discoveries
> made. People so often learn things, and so rarely come back to share them.

So: Blog your new experiences, submit them to HN, and (if this link is more
relevant to HN than to readers hitting your blog otherwise) make a comment
noting the relation to the previous HN discussion, with an appropriate link.

You don't need personal contact details to post a followup to a discussion on
an open public forum.

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Pyrodogg
I provide one for introductions that winds up in my 'real' inbox. I've made
one great contact through it so far and hope to make more as time goes on. No
issues with spam.

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dopeboy
I share my contact details because I want to give people the ability to follow
up with me privately on a submission or comment I made. HN is a wonderful
community and I treasure its openness but sometimes you just want to be
discreet about certain things. It's also a good way to prevent thread
hijacking.

I'm also explicitly seeking someone right now (a co-founder) and leaving
contact details gives an interested person a way to follow up with that.

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kijin
A related reminder: If you're active on GitHub, have contributed to any FOSS
project, or have participated in any mailing list (including Google Groups),
your email address is probably public already. So you can stop worrying about
spambots harvesting your email address. All the spambots know about you
already.

~~~
reitanqild
Correct. For some of us it is more about not linking our hn persona with our
email. There exist a number of reasons for why this is beneficial to some of
us: woking at certain places, families with certain ideas, living in certain
countries etc.

~~~
natch
Using an address from an email forwarding service such as spamgourmet might
not mitigate all of these concerns, but it should mitigate some of them. Says
the guy who doesn't have even a spamgourmet address in his profile. Hmm, maybe
I'll do that.

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freedevbootcamp
LEO and the NSA would like it if you add as much personal information as
possible, so please do that and help them out.

