Ask YC: How do you follow YC threads you enjoy?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=396186

by bprater • 18 years ago

29 48 18 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Often, I find great stories and comments I enjoy here and plan to return to see more comments, but when I get back to the site -- I completely forget.

Do any of you have a simple technique (or even a script) for keeping an eye on posts you enjoy?

noodle• 18 years ago

yeah, i vote them up. there's a link in your profile that shows your saved stuff.

vasudeva• 18 years ago

I usually just wait for the RSS feed to re-announce it later on and remind me, but I like your method better. ;)

bprater2• 18 years ago

Ah, cool, I didn't know up-voting plopped them in that area.

The downside is that I like to up-vote some posts, but don't necessary want to follow the on-going conversation.

theantidote• 18 years ago

Concurred. It took me a while to find that saved thing though, it should be more prominent.

brett• 18 years ago

It used to be in the menu.

Frabjous-Dey• 18 years ago

Oh, cool. Thanks for pointing that out. I didn't know that was there.

aston• 18 years ago

I make a post in it, then check on my "threads" page (and my post's parent) every now and then. I'm doing it now, for example.

noelchurchill• 18 years ago

Yep this is what I do too.

jamesbritt• 18 years ago

Same here. Someone wrote a Web ap that would sort of do this for you, and emit an RSS feed (It think), but it would create an entry for each up or down vote, which was not that useful to me.

swombat• 18 years ago

I do that too... works fine for me.

qqq• 18 years ago

leave it open in a tab, refresh later.

oakmac• 18 years ago

bd• 18 years ago

On the related note: how do you keep track of which comments are new since your last visit of the thread?

HN/reddit system with comments jumping around based on votes makes it hard just to quickly skim for differences.

Could there be a way to highlight not seen items? I found this a big help for information overload on the sites that do it (e.g. Google Reader, Bloglines).

However, I couldn't figure out how to do it elegantly (i.e. not needing to keep state on the server for each user) for prioritized threaded comments systems like HN/reddit.

For updates of a single page it's easy, you just need to bake timestamps for each item and page creation into HTML/JS and check them against the last page timestamp stored in the cookie.

But this system breaks down for multiple pages, as each one would need own cookie entry, otherwise any site visit would mark all new items as read.

That's btw MetaFilter's problem with highlighting new comments. Though there it's easier to follow the conversation due to linear nature of comment system.

Maybe the solution could be to have some dual way of accessing comments? Like prioritized threaded view for the first view and linear time ordered view for subsequent following?

parenthesis• 18 years ago

Sorry! I was trying to vote you up, but voted you down by mistake instead. Someone else please vote the parent comment up for me.

transburgh2• 18 years ago

I agree about the comment movements but it has been discussed here before. It would be nice to have the option to keep comments the way they are (moving) or to view them based on the time they were left.

issue9mm• 18 years ago

If you know which comments on a page are new, then you also know which ones are old. The easy answer is to just gray out the older posts (only remotely challenging because the gray background of the page is about the color I WOULD have suggested for old comment text) -- and just leave the new comments as they are.

That allows you to easily skim the page for new content, while still allowing you to see the new posts in context.

A Digg-style collapse would also probably work, but for some reason, I see grayed out text more in line with the ycombinator mantra.

dionidium• 18 years ago

I wrote a greasemonkey script to help me. It marks comments that have already been read. The way it marks comments is ugly and probably backwards (i.e. you probably only want to mark new comments, not the other way around). I did it as a proof-of-concept, mostly, but this thread convinced me to make it available.

http://dionidium.com/projects/greasemonkey/markasread.user.j...

asmosoinio• 18 years ago

YC Tracker does this for single pages:

http://www.selfdebugging.com/2007/10/09/yc-news-tracker-a-be...

However you have to remember to run the script first time you see the page to be able to compare later. This kills it for me most of the time.

transburgh2• 18 years ago

I keep it in Google Reader and just revisit the next time I go through the feed.

pg2• 18 years ago

Should I add some kind of feature for this?

Shamiq• 18 years ago

Yes.

pg2• 18 years ago

Let me rephrase that. Does anyone have any suggestions for features of this type?

snprbob86• 18 years ago

Starred conversations seems like an appropriate solution.

bprater2• 18 years ago

I really like this idea too, just like stars in Gmail. A star would appear next to the article name in the index page (and detail page). One click and a star next to the article.

Works like a charm in Gmail. No need to even float stars to the top, just allow the user to filter only starred articles with one click.

nebula• 18 years ago

Off topic but still relevant: can we have thread folding for comments?

emmett• 18 years ago

I track conversations I'm involved in through the Threads link at the top (which is quite useful). I'd like to be able to have a one click add-this-conversation-I'm-not-involved-in-to-my-Threads-list button.

thomasmallen• 18 years ago

I have a little request, if possible.

For code blocks, instead of "two-spacing", could you implement a delimiter, e.g. [code][/code]? For something more elegant than BBCode, maybe ##...## could delimit code.

Fuca• 18 years ago

readitlater addon on firefox

twism• 18 years ago

I built a little app for this...

http://ycfeeds.com/feed/comments-on-item?item=396186

vlad• 18 years ago

I upvote articles that I don't have time to read, but want to keep track of. I've been doing this for at least a year, since the /saved?id=vlad feature came out (articles a user upvotes are available via that suffix to the url.)

rfunduk• 18 years ago

My technique is super low-tech. In my bookmarks bar, positioned conveniently below the site's favicon, I have a folder which is called "For Later". Into this folder I drop stuff I'll want to come back to at some point. Then (and here's the super part of my super low-tech claim), when I'm done with it I move it to another folder called "x" which I periodically delete and re-create.

This works everywhere with no extensions or anything, I use Foxmarks to sync the bookmarks themselves between machines (which you could skip if you only used the one machine), that's it.

yters• 18 years ago

Let's hear it for low tech. I like it when people are able to chain existing, simple tools; instead of engineering a new kludge.

catone• 18 years ago

To be honest, I usually just keep the thread open in a tab for a few hours until things die down. That said, I generally only comment on a handful of threads per week, so that's a manageable system for me. For those of you who participate more, I think that wouldn't work so well.

danw• 18 years ago

Bookmark to instapaper. Come back and read later

Ask YC: How do you follow YC threads you enjoy?

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