There’s surely a huge liability in maintaining a database of (HN username, email) pairs. It’s a valuable target that will attract attention and I’m wary of becoming part of a breach.
So: a small privacy statement would be great to see, and maybe a note on security measures in place?
Apologies to DG if I’ve been living under a rock and you are a leading figure in Security research whose reputation I should know!
Edit: But having said that, this tool can come really handy in some cases
I know that some HNers will say HN > Reddit but this is in general I know some subbreddits that are better then HN and if you use those is great to see when somebody responded to your quality comment with an other quality comment.
Humans are on average dumb pedantic jerks in internet comment sections everywhere. Some comment sections just have norms of conduct that do a better job masking it and making the people who can't mask it feel unwelcome. On HN we engage in mental gymnastics to avoid being wrong. On Reddit when people can't win they reply "yikes" or "who hurt you" and create an ad-hominum. On the chans they just call you a racial slur of some sort.
As an example you could compare r/starttrek vs r/DaystromInstitute , in the first you will find tons of low effort content and comments (memes, bad jokes,personal attacks, off topic stuff) int he second one only on topic and medium effor comments are allowed.
The quality of HN threads benefits from more thought out comments and fewer reflexive replies. Notifications can promote “engagement” in the superficial sense of increasing frequency of replies, but will damage engagement in the deeper sense of decreasing depth of thought.
Is it really a thing to bash Reddit for everything?
I mean, it's not great in general, but the few subreddits I follow are much better than HN, at least nobody is telling you what's good and what is not, it's the community that regulates itself.
Isn't it possible that having a bad experience with Reddit is a “show me who your friends are, and I’ll tell you who you are” more than anything else?
For any company related stuff I usually checked in regularly and also have google alerts set up.
But for casual banter, I think the no notification is a nice feature of HN and probably reduces some of the bad noise other public forums have.
That being said, still a nice feature to add for those who want it =]
Maybe add a limit on how many 'followed threads' you could have active at the same time, so they discourage automating this behavior and make you really think if the thread is that important for you at the moment.
Sometimes my karma randomly goes up a bit, and in investigating why, I get to go back and re-enjoy threads on articles because someone replied to something from a while ago, but most of all I like the impetuous is on me to go look for replies, I think it adds a level of friction that makes the HN experience better.
That being said, good work and I’m sure others will find value. Just not for me.
Thanks for making a great free product.
I don't want more email.
Well, well, well. For a crowd that cries each time somebody like Google & Co gets data on users, this does sounds like the best tool to get hold of developers without them realizing they've just been fished :D.