

Ask HN: How do people know they're being talked about on HN? - dpweb

Repeatedly on HN, this will happen.  Someone will mention something, like for instance someone says something about a16z, and the next thing Mark Andreessen is commenting back in the thread.<p>Or someone says &quot;X company is bullshit!&quot; and 5 minutes later you see in the thread, &quot;CEO of X Company here..  We&#x27;re not bullshit&quot;.<p>Some of these people are famous and I would think, not hanging out staring at HN (in these particular threads no less) all day.<p>How are they being alerted that their company etc.. is being discussed and able to respond so quickly?
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julien421
[http://HNWatcher.com](http://HNWatcher.com) is a free service we launched to
do so ;)

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w1ntermute
Any plans to expand it to more sites?

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julien421
Possibly to Reddit. Which service do you have in mind?

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mistermann
Twitter

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RossM
Mention.com might be worth looking into for that.

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amanthei
Hey there, I’m the Community Manager for mention and I’d be happy to answer
any and all questions! alex at mention dot com - we’re always here to help!

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ironmagma
There are many ways. Google Alerts, companies' traffic logs seeing many Hacker
News referrers (most likely), word of mouth...

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julien421
Google Alert does not seem to work at all for HN

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dan_manges
Somebody tells them about it. It could be somebody who hangs out on HN that
sees it, or somebody at the company that watches web traffic referrals or uses
something like HNWatcher that julien421 mentioned.

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processing
using something like [http://hnwatcher.com](http://hnwatcher.com)

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vezzy-fnord
Several scenarios:

1) They are, in fact, hanging out at HN more than you think.

2) They routinely type their names into the search box, out of curiosity or to
gauge their publicity.

3) (unlikely) They're continuing the age-old trend of kibozing (see
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Parry](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Parry)),
where they write scripts that crawl and grep for certain terms, so that they
may respond. I'm not sure how HN handles bots, and if anyone actually does
this here.

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jkarneges
#3 isn't too hard if you use the HNStream API
([http://hnstream.com/](http://hnstream.com/))

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samstave
also - to get emails when someone replies to you: hnnotify.com

