[HN Gopher] Show HN: HN Follow - Follow Your Friends on HN
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Show HN: HN Follow - Follow Your Friends on HN
HN Follow lets you follow authors on Hacker News, and get email
notifications when they post. It was inspired by alerthn.com and
hnreplies.com. The app was built in an experimental style on Val
Town. We're trying to create a new web primitive that you can: 1.
write like a function 2. run like a script 3. fork like a repo 4.
install like an app This is our 5th iteration of this same "HN
Follow" app. We launched the 3rd version here on Hacker News six
months ago[1], but it was very kindly removed from the front page
by dang in favor of us launching Val Town itself first, which we
did in January[2]. We're trying to strike the right balance
between something you can use and install with one click, and
something you can infinitely customize. For example, you could fork
`@rodrigoTello.hnFollowApp`[3] and change the input parameter from
authors to a generic query, like I do here[4] to get notifications
whenever "val town" is mentioned on HN. In addition to emailing
myself (via `console.email`), I also send a message to our team's
Discord. The possibilities are endless, but it can also be
overwhelming. We're trying to find the balance where we help you
navigate the space of possible integrations, without limiting you
the way a no-code tool would. We would really appreciate your guys'
feedback and suggestions! [1] - HN Follow, first launch:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33533830 [2] - Val Town
launch: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34343122 [3] -
`@rodrigotello.hnFollowApp`:
https://www.val.town/v/rodrigotello.hnFollowApp [4] - My fork of
hnFollow: https://www.val.town/v/stevekrouse.hnValTown
Author : stevekrouse
Score : 89 points
Date : 2023-05-25 14:29 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.val.town)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.val.town)
| PaulHoule wrote:
| ... that's a lot of email isn't it?
| stevekrouse wrote:
| Depends who you follow, right?
| mjdowney wrote:
| Out of curiosity, any plans on adding push notification
| primitives?
| stevekrouse wrote:
| We go back and forth on what we should add to the platform
| vs encourage you to do for yourself. For example, you can
| do this yourself fairly easily with ntfy.sh:
| https://www.val.town/v/axelav.sendNotification
|
| But wouldn't it be even nicer to have `console.push` in the
| platform and it'd then prompt you to accept notifications
| right from our desktop or mobile website? Maybe soon!
| PaulHoule wrote:
| I am always hearing from people who'd like to know when
| somebody replies to one of their comments. It seems like
| a notification system for Hacker News could be
| interesting in general. It's not particularly hard to
| write a script that follows new posts and comments but
| I'm not so sure how you pick up edits other than just
| running slow enough that you fetch stuff after the edit
| window has expired.
| jimmySixDOF wrote:
| God bless Dan Grossman keeping this open and running
| wherever he is: hnreplies.com
| ra7 wrote:
| You can use https://www.hnreplies.com to get notified
| when someone replies to your comments.
| akkartik wrote:
| Speaking as a heavy user and inbox 0 person, the rule I use for
| these emails is "skim then delete".
| 2023throwawayy wrote:
| Off topic, but I would love the opposite of this. The ability to
| block certain HN users, just hide their comments entirely.
| Certain people have shown again and again they are not willing to
| have good faith arguments, and I simply don't care to be
| subjected to their nonsense.
| altairprime wrote:
| Such a system would fail at HN, if offered by the site itself.
| Many users have accounts registered for the sole purpose of
| bypassing "identity over time" recognition, whether by karma
| and flagging or simply by username recognition. Anyone who
| perceives themselves to be blocked would just keep registering
| new accounts to exempt themselves from it, or maintain a
| collection of accounts to circumvent it. The absence of blocks
| removes a key benefit of doing so, which helps keep the
| sockpuppet population down.
|
| (Note that if you see users that are frequently breaking the
| guidelines, please consider emailing the site mods using the
| footer contact link, so that they can consider whether further
| review and/or action is necessary.)
| Zetice wrote:
| A minor point, but the vernacular has shifted to this being
| called "muting" whereas blocking is the much more toxic, "and
| they can't see what you post either".
|
| Platforms that implement blocking almost always see it
| weaponized by hate groups, not to mention how antithetical it
| is to allowing a user to control their feed, and the argument
| of "targeted harassment if people can see my content" doesn't
| hold water given how trivially easy it is to circumvent ( _if_
| targeted harassment is the goal).
| krapp wrote:
| There are browser plugins that will do this. I use one, it does
| wonders for my mental health.
| [deleted]
| mellosouls wrote:
| I haven't particularly noticed this. I mean, sure there are
| times when I've felt a lack of good faith in the other party,
| but that tends to be individual discussions rather than seeing
| repeat offenders; its often been noted the quality of
| discussion here is higher than most other places - but perhaps
| I don't spend enough time on here to have noticed the really
| annoying types.
| jedberg wrote:
| The downside to allowing blocking is that the site works best
| when you downvote that kind of content, because then everyone
| else doesn't have to be subjected to it. It's why we resisted a
| block feature on reddit for a long time. Because the site only
| works if bad stuff is downvoted.
| TACD wrote:
| So why not incorporate blocks as a signal for the ranking
| algorithm? The simple version is every person that blocks
| $USER causes a - _n_ modifier on all of $USER 's content;
| more complex versions could scale the modifier with the
| number of people (or the combined "reputation" of the people)
| blocking $USER or shadowban them once _x_ % of posters block
| them.
|
| Open to abuse? Potentially, but so are a lot of community
| voting features, and reliably muting serial trolls would be a
| useful feature for a lot of social sites.
| Avicebron wrote:
| One problem I immediately see with this is that it's
| difficult to define what a serial troll (excluding bot
| accounts) is vs someone a community doesn't like for
| whatever reason, using a downvoting system at least
| provides some leeway in discussion that is on the boundary
| of what is and isn't commonly accepted for a given comment
| at a given time within a conversation.
| faffffaf wrote:
| Interesting that many subreddits have removed downvoting, for
| a variety of reasons.
| all2 wrote:
| MY understanding of this community is that we strive to
| _not_ be Reddit, especially from the discourse and
| moderation perspectives.
| pessimizer wrote:
| My understanding is that HN exists without reference to
| reddit, other than to ask people not to compare it to
| reddit again.
| codetrotter wrote:
| One of the problems for subreddits is people coming from
| the front page or from other subreddits, who are not part
| of the community of that subreddit, and begin to downvote
| things etc.
|
| HN is lucky in this regard; there is just one HN, not
| uncountable "sub-HNs".
|
| Of course people can still come from other places to HN.
| But to earn downvote privileges here you first need some
| amount of karma. So hopefully this makes it so that
| downvote privileges on HN are mostly handed to people who
| are at least somewhat aligned with the broader community
| here.
| mahathu wrote:
| Is that actually possible now? I remember a few years ago,
| some moderators removed downvoting for people who aren't
| subscribed to their sub using custom css, but of course it
| was easy to circumvent and didn't affect mobile users.
| pessimizer wrote:
| Blocking downvoting hides gamed/promoted comments, so it's
| a situation that moderators would generally prefer. It's
| definitely the reason Youtube did it; because it was
| ditching individual creators without professional
| production values and trying to promote corporate
| traditional broadcast content.
|
| 50 inauthentic upvotes for something no one likes, while
| hundreds of frustrated potential downvoters fume. Then
| someone puts up a reply designed to be upvoted as a proxy
| for the lack of ability to downvote the inauthentically
| boosted comment, and that reply is quickly deleted as
| trolling or a personal attack.
|
| Showing the total number of views like Twitter does now is
| a positively-vibed kludge for people who hate the whiff of
| negativity, although all of Twitter's stats seem wonky as
| hell under new leadership. Still, a low upvote/view ratio
| can also represent indifference or people not believing
| they're qualified to comment on something, rather than
| being a great signal for disapproval.
|
| So you can still game that pretty well by Gish Galloping
| with a ton of broad references (entire papers or books
| rather than passages from them or reasonable summaries),
| and lots of people will disqualify themselves from
| downvoting because they aren't going to click through to
| the papers, while others will upvote just because it looks
| like the commenter is making an effort.
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| That is kinda shifting more of the moderation burden onto the
| people most likely to receive negative interaction and
| harassment yeah?
| SilasX wrote:
| Right, it would make more sense to have a plugin that makes
| your account automatically downvote any of those users'
| comments as you encounter them. Or even better, periodically
| pull up their latest comments and downvote them.
|
| Not advocating that, of course, and it feels contrary to what
| the benevolent mod team would prefer. And I assume that the
| site has some countermeasure for that, like it does against
| upvoting a submission that you accessed via direct link
| instead from from the main site?
| alwaysbeconsing wrote:
| While I understand that argument, I imagine most regular
| readers do not have the down vote privilege and may not for a
| long time, if ever. (I'm not sure in fact what the threshhold
| is, but it seems to be high.) To post enough and get upvoted
| enough to achieve it probably takes years on average.
| dingledork69 wrote:
| It's only 500 karma, a handful of successful posts will get
| you there. If you want to farm points, just go to /new,
| look for threads with 1-2 other comments and post something
| that is likely to be upvoted. Don't forget to upvote the
| post.
| plugin-baby wrote:
| > only 500 karma
|
| I think you underestimate how little some of us have to
| say.
| talhah wrote:
| Exactly, I just absorb whatever I read and comment in
| rare circumstances. In those rare circumstances, there's
| many times where people have said what I wanted.
| zamadatix wrote:
| That's a very interesting question. I always assumed most
| daily users do, by a wide margin, but I never actually had
| any data to base that off of. I even thought this before I
| had the 501 karma needed.
|
| By absolute user count I'd definitely expect most to not
| have it but only because most accounts aren't regularly
| used (many even abandoned).
| pow_pp_-1_v wrote:
| Another example: I have this account since 2015 and I
| started reading HN years before. I still can't downvote.
| alwaysbeconsing wrote:
| That's fair; I am also only using supposition.
| superturkey650 wrote:
| A little example: I've used the site for a little over 4
| years but don't usually post or comment. If I do comment,
| it's something really specific or to try and help clear a
| misunderstanding so usually low karma amounts. I
| regularly participate through flagging and upvotes but
| only have ~50 karma so I still can't downvote and will
| likely never be able to.
|
| Not saying it shouldn't be this way, but downvotes are
| heavily biased toward people who regularly post or
| comment.
| nico wrote:
| Downvoting doesn't work that well
|
| The main issue is that if a comment gets downvoted when newly
| created, it looses almost all visibility (gets shown further
| down), and it mostly dies, just from one downvote
|
| This just creates and echo chamber where only the most
| accepted/mainstream opinions bubble up
|
| It would be nice if we could "sort by controversial" or "sort
| by new", so that we got more variety of opinions
| WirelessGigabit wrote:
| I wonder if this can be achieved with uBlock Origin.
|
| Like delete the div where div > div > span=WirelessGigabit.
| stellartux wrote:
| This seems to work.
|
| table:has(> tbody > tr > td > div > span >
| a[href="user?id=USERNAME"])
| orliesaurus wrote:
| Why did you choose to build this on Val.town?
| stevekrouse wrote:
| We're the creators of Val Town ;)
| aejae wrote:
| Got to say, the H1 on the main landing page is amazing.
| stevekrouse wrote:
| thanks!
| zoogeny wrote:
| Just some random feedback on the val.town interface. The concept
| is interesting but I have one gripe.
|
| I want to know what the code I'm about to run will do and I
| notice the pretty unique `@stevekrouse.hnLatestPosts` type
| interface where it looks like you can reference functions. But
| this leads to a deep chain of reference. Like, that function
| leads to `@stevekrouse.hnSearch` which leads to
| `@stevekrouse.fetchJSON` which leads to
| `@stevekrouse.normalizeURL`, etc.
|
| There is some kind of DAG of dependencies that is invisible to
| me. I'm wondering what could be done from a UI perspective here?
| Like, maybe a tree view where each node is expandable? Right now
| it just pops open a new browser tab and I end up with context
| spread across multiple tabs.
|
| The concept of composable references is powerful but I think the
| UX could be improved.
| avgcorrection wrote:
| I could never be friends with someone who posts on HN.
| hdjjhhvvhga wrote:
| I don't understand your comment; I have several real-life
| friends who have accounts here (and normally I discover it by
| accident, and we don't exchange our nicknames as everybody
| would try to pretend we enjoy some semi-anonimity here).
| aaronharnly wrote:
| It's kind of a variant of
| https://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/04/18/groucho-resigns/
| nhatcher wrote:
| They are paraphrasing " I don't want to belong to any club
| that would have me as a member!"
| valianteffort wrote:
| GP was being sardonic
| cj wrote:
| Just curious, how do you prevent/mitigate abuse or spam in a
| cloud scripting environment like this?
| stevekrouse wrote:
| Great question!
|
| Andrew Healey wrote a great blog post about sandboxing,
| particularly related to us: https://healeycodes.com/sandboxing-
| javascript-code
|
| And we recently launched more secure semantics:
| https://blog.val.town/blog/restricted-library-mode
|
| But in the general case, it's a hard, never-ending cat-and-
| mouse game, particularly with free and unauthenticated use. We
| will eventually probably need to restrict use severely unless
| you have somehow proved you're a real person (ie connect to
| your github account) or are a paying customer.
| rubenfiszel wrote:
| Ola from windmill.dev which has some overlap but is focused
| on enterprise and self-hosted infra.
|
| We have exactly the same issues for the cloud and ended up
| securing everything through nsjail and the deno run
| sandboxing. I admire that you're willing to allow
| unauthentified users to run computations. Do you guys have
| timeout ? How do you ensure resource isolation? We use
| kubernetes for resource isolation, and we use both timeouts
| and quotas where each second a background process will kill
| the job if the user/job is over it. Let me know if you guys
| are up to chat at some point and congrats on the very nice
| UX.
| stevekrouse wrote:
| Windmill is very cool! Reminds me a bit of pipedream.com
| too, but it's cool that you guys are open-source and self-
| hostable.
|
| Yeah we have a timeout, but will likely need to continue to
| add restrictions as we scale and get more abuse. We are
| mostly relying on deno's workers to isolate user code, but
| will probably add additional process isolation soon, and
| dedicated private resources for serious customers one day.
|
| Would love to chat & share tips! Email me? steve@val.town
| todsacerdoti wrote:
| Sounds like we need a support group for founders of
| companies that let users run any code in the cloud. We
| have our own bitcoin mining war stories. I am sure Amjad
| from Repl.it will join.
| ginto wrote:
| > But in the general case, it's a hard, never-ending cat-and-
| mouse game
|
| One point of view is that in the general case this problem is
| solvable, has been solved, and the solution isn't well known.
| hdjjhhvvhga wrote:
| Now, the really scary option would be to automatically correlate
| HN accounts with other accounts and pieces of text based on the
| previous work done in this area to find alternative HN accounts
| (that was already awkward enough).
| [deleted]
| tomrod wrote:
| I like the idea. I worry it will result in skewed incentives
| affecting content if widely adopted (i.e. LinkedInSanity)
| stevekrouse wrote:
| What do you mean by LinkedInSanity?
| WaitWaitWha wrote:
| > Remove filler, upsells, click bait and other low or
| negative-value annoyances.
|
| https://github.com/taylr/linkedinsanity
| tomrod wrote:
| Mis-remembered the phrase, it's /r/LinkedInLunatics.
|
| Thanks for the callout!
| badrabbit wrote:
| I am sure there are bots/people that follow their enemies and
| downvote lol. Everytime I post something unpopular, I get my non-
| controversial posts downvoted predictably for some time. Or maybe
| that's just shadow moderation.
| quaintdev wrote:
| How about an app that shows a list of friends like below
|
| pg(3)
|
| cj(4)
|
| stevekrouse(2)
|
| Each of above name is hyperlinked and leads to a page where I can
| see all their updates. The count in bracket let's me know how
| many updates they have. This is not necessarily a suggestion for
| this app. I wish more social media apps adopted this approach
| instead of current time hogging feeds.
| stevekrouse wrote:
| This is a cool idea too! The easiest thing to do here would be
| to schedule it to run daily or weekly instead of hourly. But
| you can also build this aggregation thing too on Val Town. Lmk
| if you want a hand with that!
| gnicholas wrote:
| "When they post"
|
| Does this include comments, or just posting submissions?
|
| IMO the former would be overkill for email notifications, and the
| latter would be not terribly useful.
| stevekrouse wrote:
| It includes both. I just made a forked version that takes an
| extra `tags` parameter that lets you customize which kinds of
| posts you want to subscribe to:
|
| https://www.val.town/v/stevekrouse.hnFollowApp
|
| You can see all the tag types (and other search options) here:
| https://hn.algolia.com/api
|
| Happy to help you customize it however you'd like :)
| alan-stark wrote:
| What's the value of bringing Facebook/Instagram mechanics into
| HN? Wouldn't that skew social dynamics away from egalitarianism,
| giving rise to "influencers", social bubbles and rise in
| clickbait? I think that _not_ having a 'follow your friends'
| mechanism is _a feature_ of HN.
| jfengel wrote:
| I want the opposite of that: "This guy is an asshole and I just
| don't want to see him ever again."
| hoosieree wrote:
| I have this half-baked idea for an anti-social media website
| where the only way to "engage" is by blocking people.
| aziaziazi wrote:
| Great idea! What about fade-away hnstyle with a color teint?
| Maybe updating a gist with Val Town and referencing that gist
| from a css file with Stylish? Or another way js only...
|
| Edit: some can hack it to tint people they like.
| [deleted]
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Do you have an option to opt out of being followed?
| stevekrouse wrote:
| No, sorry. It's just polling HN via the Agolia API, so if you
| post on HN publicly, anyone can poll for that data.
| [deleted]
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