
Ask HN: Do you think HN should add notifications system? - talhof8
On one hand, I think it can be quite useful. When I sumbit a comment or a story, the only way for me to know someone replied, is to re-enter HN later. I miss a lot of replies this way. On the other hand, I think it can ruin HN simplicity and "purity". What do you think?
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1123581321
There is no need thanks to this third-party service: <http://hnnotify.com/>

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thrush
That's a nice service, but the developer could use this to find out the emails
of subscribers. He does have a quick note about privacy: "I will not sell or
share the email list with anyone." But this doesn't seem sufficient.

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DanBC
No. There's a problem with a few people who only ever submit articles that
they've written (which are hosted on ad heavy websites) and who make no other
contribution to HN. I don't want another set of people who only ever
contribute to the threads that they've created to discuss some bit of
blogspam.

If anything I think names of people commenting should be hidden for 24 hours,
so that you don't know if you're responding to the same person within a thread
or not. That might help to cut down snark. (And it avoids the problems we have
of toxic-anonymity).

I also don't think that HN should do this stuff, but should have a nice
interface to allow people to create extensions and plugins and user scripts.
(There are very many such already. Someone creating a nice curated list with
screen shots and user reviews would get huge amounts of karma.)

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krapp
I think there's plenty of room in the profile for, say, a list of most recent
replies (or have a |replies| option show up in the menu.)

Simplicity is nice but I suppose YMMV as to the line where utility becomes
unnecessary complexity. Email notifications might be too much but even then
sending them out as a daily digest might not be so spammy.

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bcl
No.

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afeezaziz
+1 to No.

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saurik
HN used to have this feature (natively, configured in your profile) by way of
Notifo (a Y Combinator startup).

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fakeer
Notifo was shut down long ago. I just saw the goodbye post. Ironically their
blog is hosted on Posterous.

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mschuster91
Yes. And I would gladly pay 2 or 3 euros for such a feature.

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fakeer
I think <https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=your_user_id> does a pretty
good job.

Though never checked if the API is open for having such an app or one could
monitor this by user-id and trigger custom notifications(out of HN I mean)
when there are nested replied.

