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Comment by scoot | Hacker News Reader

Reddit style reply notifications might be helpful. It's easy to miss a reply to ones own comments. Knowing this is true for others discourages revisiting an old discussion with new learning and insight, as it won't be seen by those involved in the original conversation, never mind a wider audience.

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I understand that notifications could be helpful in some cases, but I actually like the fact that people don't get notified when someone replies to their comment, and I had assumed this was deliberate. It seems to make debates more objective. For example, if user A makes a statement, and then B disagrees, I like the fact that C can come along and backup A's points, rather than a defensive response from A. (Having notifications that were delayed by an hour or so might make for a good middle ground.)

My understanding is that it, no automatic notification of replies, is deliberate and the reason is to avoid stimulating flame wars. As someone who posts a lot and usually tries to avoid flame wars, the first thing I do on any site is turn off email notifications. If I care, I look at the threading of my comments.

Preventing 'flame wars' by making conversations more awkward and difficult to follow as time goes on just seems to create friction for everyone. And it doesn't prevent flame wars - people who are emotionally invested in an argument will follow a thread on their own accord. We've all seen them, i'm kind of ashamed to say i've participated in a few.

But, notifications could be opt in by default and opt out by choice, and they wouldn't necessarily have to be by email - you could be shown the last few replies to your comments in your account.

Just to clarify terms here, "opt-in" means disabled by default, with user action needed to enable the feature. "opt-out" means on-by-default with the ability to disable it: exactly the situation you describe. At least, that's my understanding.

I may have misstated, then.. I meant that by default, you wouldn't get any notifications unless you chose to, and if you did, you could turn them off at any time.

A longer delay would also be fine. Perhaps after a certain amount of time notifications could be turned on - say 5 days after a post + 1 hour delay? That seems to be in line with the OP, but I'm not sure.

It would definitely be nice to have as part of HN itself. In the meantime there is http://hnnotify.com/

Thanks for share, I haven't hear of this.

It always amazed me how the missing features on HN created a bunch of side-services!!

We are a truly creative gang

Agree and this is a place where HNNotify doesn't really work - this feature is only useful if most people use it because otherwise you are not going to make the comment in the first place.

As noted, HNNotify, but the OP did not talk about this. After some time threads are closed and you cannot comment on them any more. OP suggests people leave contact info in their profiles, in case somebody stumbles onto your comments and wants to talk to you for some reason.

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