Ask HN: How do people know they're being talked about on HN?

Posted by dpweb on Saturday April 12, 2014 @02:25PM
from the ask-hn dept.

Repeatedly on HN, this will happen. Someone will mention something, like for instance someone says something about a16z, and the next thing Mark Andreessen is commenting back in the thread.

Or someone says "X company is bullshit!" and 5 minutes later you see in the thread, "CEO of X Company here.. We're not bullshit".

Some of these people are famous and I would think, not hanging out staring at HN (in these particular threads no less) all day.

How are they being alerted that their company etc.. is being discussed and able to respond so quickly?

( 16 comments | 18 points | on HN )

Re:Ask HN: How do people know they're being talked about on HN? by julien421 on Saturday April 12, 2014 @02:52PM (#7578748)

http://HNWatcher.com is a free service we launched to do so ;)

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Ask HN: How do people know they're being talked about on HN? by canatan01 on Saturday April 12, 2014 @03:26PM (#7578860)

Nice. Two years ago made something similar to follow HN users on http://www.nou.nl/hn/

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Ask HN: How do people know they're being talked about on HN? by nickstinemates on Sunday April 13, 2014 @12:39PM (#7581823)

I use it extensively (and it's how I found this post!)

Love the tool, I learn so much about areas of interest as a result of it.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Ask HN: How do people know they're being talked about on HN? by w1ntermute on Saturday April 12, 2014 @02:56PM (#7578768)

Any plans to expand it to more sites?

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Ask HN: How do people know they're being talked about on HN? by julien421 on Saturday April 12, 2014 @02:58PM (#7578774)

Possibly to Reddit. Which service do you have in mind?

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Ask HN: How do people know they're being talked about on HN? by w1ntermute on Sunday April 13, 2014 @08:18PM (#7583802)

I was thinking of Reddit, in fact. It would have to be subreddit-specific though, since the larger subreddits are too noisy.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Ask HN: How do people know they're being talked about on HN? by mistermann on Saturday April 12, 2014 @03:05PM (#7578798)

Twitter

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Ask HN: How do people know they're being talked about on HN? by RossM on Saturday April 12, 2014 @03:31PM (#7578876)

Mention.com might be worth looking into for that.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Ask HN: How do people know they're being talked about on HN? by amanthei on Monday April 14, 2014 @06:23AM (#7585379)

Hey there, I’m the Community Manager for mention and I’d be happy to answer any and all questions! alex at mention dot com - we’re always here to help!

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Ask HN: How do people know they're being talked about on HN? by ironmagma on Saturday April 12, 2014 @02:43PM (#7578721)

There are many ways. Google Alerts, companies' traffic logs seeing many Hacker News referrers (most likely), word of mouth...

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Ask HN: How do people know they're being talked about on HN? by julien421 on Saturday April 12, 2014 @02:51PM (#7578745)

Google Alert does not seem to work at all for HN

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Ask HN: How do people know they're being talked about on HN? by dan_manges on Saturday April 12, 2014 @03:07PM (#7578804)

Somebody tells them about it. It could be somebody who hangs out on HN that sees it, or somebody at the company that watches web traffic referrals or uses something like HNWatcher that julien421 mentioned.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Ask HN: How do people know they're being talked about on HN? by processing on Saturday April 12, 2014 @02:43PM (#7578719)

using something like http://hnwatcher.com

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Ask HN: How do people know they're being talked about on HN? by vezzy-fnord on Saturday April 12, 2014 @02:45PM (#7578727)

Several scenarios:

1) They are, in fact, hanging out at HN more than you think.

2) They routinely type their names into the search box, out of curiosity or to gauge their publicity.

3) (unlikely) They're continuing the age-old trend of kibozing (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Parry), where they write scripts that crawl and grep for certain terms, so that they may respond. I'm not sure how HN handles bots, and if anyone actually does this here.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Ask HN: How do people know they're being talked about on HN? by jkarneges on Saturday April 12, 2014 @02:53PM (#7578755)

#3 isn't too hard if you use the HNStream API (http://hnstream.com/)

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Ask HN: How do people know they're being talked about on HN? by samstave on Saturday April 12, 2014 @03:42PM (#7578910)

also - to get emails when someone replies to you: hnnotify.com

[ Parent | on HN ]