Wouldn't it be great to be able to follow fellow HN users?

I think that yes it would be nice but I also fear that the downside is that it may create a fealty effects where followers tend to upvote and back up their "leaders". Twitter already exists, we don't want a another one. I even suspect that it has been thought of and rejected for that very reason. Anyway there are workarounds if you really want that but let's not make it too easy either.

HN is a nice place, because you decide how to use it. You can just add HN users to your bookmarks and follow them from time to time. You could also make a simple Chrome plugin.

I've built my own private Chrome plugins, for example, to add to my experience to HN. I keep them private as I find it more respectful. With that said, I use the public Refined Hacker News [1] as well.

The fact that HN is conservative on changing its features is what I like about it. If I want a new feature, I'll build it myself.

[1] https://github.com/plibither8/refined-hacker-news

No. This is not twitter. This would only make HN worse, as another user just noticed - you'd get the Twitter-like issue of followers upvoting their leaders and downvoting everyone who has ever disagreed with them. If you find someone interesting, just read through their comments history periodically. No subscription needed.

Hi, you can use hnrss[0] for this. It's easy to add that feed to your mail client, Thunderbird for example, and receive it as new content particular to that user gets created.

- [0]: https://hnrss.github.io/#user-feeds

Please no. We'd be better off hiding usernames by default than this.

If you really want to read a user's comments, you obviously can, as you found out yourself. But let that be a manual exercise, or bookmark their page, or whatever. Keep the focus of HN on content, not personalities, please!

Pass. Keep the social media incentives as minimal as possible.

Edit: I did set up a “new response to your comment” email feature that someone posted in the Alan Kay AMA a while back. That’s useful for keeping a discussion going, but I wouldn’t want to see much more.

This would incentivize the rock-star attitude, leading to a large number of posts created by people to have followers. This, in turn, will lead to the exclusion of stories and comments from people who don't want to spend time gaining followers.

Rock-star is the antithesis of hacker, imho.

Nope. I like HN as simple as possible

This will lead to people posting lower quality comments and one liners to increase their engagement, reach and therefore following. Let's keep it simple.

A lot of HN users do have a blog you just need to find it.

There are some users here who frequently share great insights and “binging” their histories has been a delightful experience.

I think HN is fine the way it is but if anything I wish I could express my gratitude and encouragement to those users.

I was also thinking about this recently, it could be useful if HN borrowed some features from mainstream social media forums, in terms of community cohesion.

For example, being able to award/react to comments like Reddit, Facebook and Slashdot have. Sometimes it's good to just get a feel for what others are thinking of a comment, rather than having to read a comment which either basically repeats what the previous commenter said but with different words, or just disagrees without adding much. I think this would improve the information density of the forum by encouraging substantive comments, and replacing the useless padding comments to mere annotations.

(Perhaps this would be a good use of emojis? Keep them blocked from appearing in the comments themselves, but allow them as short annotations to other comments.)

Another example, having a comment thread on each user profile, which could have a mix of public or private comments. Sort of like Reddit's messaging, but with a public aspect too. HN currently has no mechanism for direct messaging for some reason, and it seems a glaring omission, considering the community-building advantages this can inspire. This would fill this gap nicely.

One more suggestion: being able to add a photograph to your own profile. It's great to talk to other people in cyberspace with text, but sometimes it's also nice to get a visual indicator of who you're communicating with. This doesn't have to be a real life photograph of course, any representative avatar would be fine. I think it would add colour and warmth to interactions on HN. Perhaps to make it more interesting for HN clientele, it could be limited to something like monochrome 256x256 for that old school feeling, or you need to upload a LISP program to generate it.

Anyway just some suggestions, would be interested to know other HNers' thoughts.

Sorry folks, I'm gonna hard pass on that one.

I distinctly remember how this played a role with Mrbabyman on Digg c. 2008 or so.

Slightly off-topic, but is there a way to sort comments by date?

Sometimes threads explode with replies. Revisiting the thread several times while the conversation is still active, I find it cumbersome to read through hundreds of the replies again to find the newest ones.

I maintain a folder with bookmarks of particular users' comments pages.

No.

In theory, one could build a service on top of HN to do this. Each user feed can be read via RSS that HN provides.

Maybe this already exists.

So I recently built a comment notifier for HN

https://hacknotescenter.com/

That I could easily add the feature to allow follows.

But it seems like at least in this thread there isn't popular support for the feature.

I think I agree it shouldn't be built into HN though

You can use hn.algolia.com, sort it by date, and then search for the usernames that you want to follow like this,

"author:username1 author:un2 .. .. .."

there is a limit on how many users you can search this way, I have split my list of users into 2 lines, and have those 2 lines pinned in my clipboard history.

Having done the whole circuit and now actively avoiding social media all together, I love this level of anonymity and there is no other place than here where you can discuss as equals without needing to be "someone" or worrying about social-merits.

I have a private HN client that does this and more but I don't want to release it and destroy what we have here. I've gone a step further and removed username display next to comments so I make judgements based solely on the content of the message.

Interesting idea but we already have twitter and blogs. I really like how simple and boring HN presents itself. If that user who’s providing interesting insight really wanted the attention, they’d go build their brand on those platforms.

Someone could or probably had made an external site to provide this. It could even be done as RSS so then you plug in your favourite reader. Would that be sufficient. Why does it need to be part of HN?

Participating in a community and becoming a public figure I think are different things. Creating followers would turn people into performers instead of participants.

just go to anyones profile and read their comments. if you like notifications use any tool that updates you on changes of a webpage.

For me not.

I like the randomness of things I get to see and do not want to make another bubble for myself.

No thanks, I'd rather not clutter the HN UI. I just use bookmarks periodically.

A killfile would be a nice feature.

we don't even have an inbox to see comment replies, why would they implement this

Negative.

Nope

No, it would not be great. It would only add to the already rampant collection of information bubbles created by the producer-follower model used by so many social networking sites. Instead of a producer-follower model I'd like to see a subject-discussant centred model where you "tune in" to a field of interest instead of a single voice. I do not follow any single author nor have I ever done so, instead I rely on search facilities to find things of interest. I use RSS feeds to "follow" publications and discussion sites - like this one - which are authored by a multitude of authors and discussants in part to avoid getting trapped in an information bubble.

Instead of an option to follow certain authors there could be an option to follow certain subjects across time, e.g. "free software mobile platforms", "process control systems based on common single-board computers", "decentralisation of internet services", etc. Posts and comments from all authors (no matter their score) can be returned on such a category in chronological order, with links back to their original appearance on the site. Categories could be created through search queries, curated by hand (similar to the way indexes like DMOZ [1] were maintained) or by using ML to track discussion trends.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DMOZ

Please no. For better of worse, HN is one of the few public outlets not afflicted by celebrity culture.

People already follow others to downvote. I suggest the opposite: Remove all usernames and points, making it more like 4chan. I think that could be quite valuable.