This is pretty neat, though I do have mixed feelings. On one hand, HN is great because it's more like a "fun things to read" aggregator to me so I don't want HN to become like a psuedo reddit. On the other hand, I feel like I have missed a lot of fun conversations because I didn't know someone replied to me and missed the window to reply since the other person wouldn't know about my response either.
The quality of HN threads benefits from more thought out comments and fewer reflexive replies. Notifications can promote “engagement” in the superficial sense of increasing frequency of replies, but will damage engagement in the deeper sense of decreasing depth of thought.
Is it really a thing to bash Reddit for everything?
I mean, it's not great in general, but the few subreddits I follow are much better than HN, at least nobody is telling you what's good and what is not, it's the community that regulates itself.
Isn't it possible that having a bad experience with Reddit is a “show me who your friends are, and I’ll tell you who you are” more than anything else?
I think it will be nice to stay as it is for the most part, but for a comment of your own you should have the ability to enable notifications for direct answers. It would be really useful when I have follow up questions.
Maybe add a limit on how many 'followed threads' you could have active at the same time, so they discourage automating this behavior and make you really think if the thread is that important for you at the moment.
It's true. There is also some interesting gamification in looking at your Karma and trying to figure out why it increased.
Sometimes my karma randomly goes up a bit, and in investigating why, I get to go back and re-enjoy threads on articles because someone replied to something from a while ago, but most of all I like the impetuous is on me to go look for replies, I think it adds a level of friction that makes the HN experience better.
