Hacker News Reader

Comment by andymoe | Hacker News Reader

Sort of a creepy idea. But no more so than Facebook or twitter I guess. I long for the days when people, myself included, hid their real contact info and used a pseudonym.

edit: Also, the pencil's pixilation is distracting and I think you should get rid of the alpha effect that goes away when hovering over the logo. (Safari 5.0.1)

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I don't see this as creepy at all, have you never checked PGs latest comments or that of a commenter with interests/opinions you share?

anyway, thank you for making this!

ps. I'd prefer rss

+1 for RSS, or better yet PubSubHubbub!

Sure, I'll try to add RSS in the weekend. Thanks for your kind words !

I don't see this as creepy at all. A lot of people posting here are smart folks with interesting ideas and unique insights, and I can see where a lot of people would want to "follow" certainly the more well-known and influential figures here.

You should know that anything you post here is public anyway, and HN makes it easy to get a digest of your comments anyway via your profile page. This is just an attempt to make the process easier - you save time by being alerted to comments rather than periodically checking for them.

Besides, reddit does something very similar already: reddit users can "friend" each other to highlight posts from people they like, and reddit user pages are rss-enabled. To my knowledge, there has been no backlash over this.

Except that at least on facebook or twitter you know when someone is following you, and have the option to block them.

On the other hand I don't think you should have any expectation of privacy in "public places" on the internet. That's just foolish.

And the service is just a convenient abbreviation for having http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=andymoe permanently open in a separate browser window.

Agreed. I recently decided to go all out and open on the Internet and embrace all that social networking has including some of the inherent creepiness. So far I've received little to zero odd encounters / phone calls / emails. It's kind of relieving actually but certainly blurs the line of where my Internet persona ends and my real privacy starts.

Of course not, in the same way that you don't expect privacy when you're walking down the street.

On the other hand, if you find that someone is following you whenever you walk down the street, well, that's a little creepy.

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