

Ask HN: HN Email Subscription? - Pistos2

Could someone please make a service that would let people subscribe to Hacker News threads and comments, and receive email notification?  I'm thinking the feature set of such a service is obvious and self-explanatory, but permit me to enumerate some of the basic features:<p>1) Subscribe to any discussion node, from parent article down to leaf comment<p>2) Receive notification of any new comments that are descendants of subscribed nodes<p>3) Optional auto subscription for your own comments<p>I'm sure many of us would agree that Hacker News discussions are generally of high quality.  Comments are usually thought-provoking, arguments solidly supported.  What I have noticed, though, is that discussion on HN only proceeds for about one or two days in most cases.  Yet, I think threads would carry on longer (and wouldn't degrade too much) if participants got notification of new responses.<p>I feel quite discouraged to post anything on an HN thread that is older than 48 hours -- I suspect extremely few people would read it, so I'd rather not spend my time.  If I knew that HN article discussions tended to last longer, I'd be more encouraged to participate.  As it stands, I can't always keep up with the latest news, and sometimes read news items 3 to 5 days after they are posted, but by then it's too late to participate.<p>If anyone could come up with an HN subscription service, I, for one, would be very grateful.  :)
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apsurd
In my mind, HN is intentionally built to be minimally social. It is also what
makes this site consistently have higher quality content. This may be of some
debate but I feel HN is slanted toward _doers_. HN is almost featureless but
one of those features is "noprocrast" - a function that actually promotes NOT
coming to the website. If pg wanted to slant toward information consumers he'd
add rss and retweeting and auto post-to-my-thousand-social-media-services
features. So it is in this way that any type of social media extravaganza
would actually be counterproductive.

HN is wonderful the way it is imo and the fact that it actually takes effort
to find things or get into to touch with other members is the reason why it is
wonderful. Take your example. If you felt the need to add your opinion the the
conversation or felt that a comment was so incredibly beneficial, take some
effort to reach out to that individual via an email or his company blog, etc.

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nreece
You can use the Hacker News RSS feed (<http://news.ycombinator.com/rss>) or
create one for any other page using Feedity (<http://feedity.com>), and
subscribe the feed with something like FeedMyInbox
(<http://www.feedmyinbox.com>)

~~~
Pistos2
But comment threads don't have any obvious RSS feeds. And I'm not looking for
notification or a feed for articles, I already use a service for that. The
Feedity+FeedMyInbox solution would only be practical if someone made a
Greasemonkey script or browser plugin to let us subscribe quickly (read: one
click).

