Remind HN: Followups are impossible if you have no contact details

[ColinWright]

One of the things I do on HN is look up previous discussions. When doing so I deliberately keep my search terms open and under-specified, because in that way I regularly and frequently turn up related items that turn out to be of interest.

Many times I want to follow up on the discussion, to recount more up-to-date experiences, or to find out what happened so I can share in any discoveries made. People so often learn things, and so rarely come back to share them.

But very few people have any contact details in their profiles. I've not been gathering data explicitly, but this submission is prompted by the frustration of wanting to help, wanting to share my experiences and/or expertise, wanting to respond to a request for assistance, or wanting to find out how things turned out, and being unable to.

I know people are concerned about exposing email addresses, etc., but I get virtually no spam to the HN visible email address, and what little I get is more than out-weighed by the emails I get from the HN community.

Sometimes people think they have shared their address when in fact they haven't. The "email" field is not visible to others, it needs to be in the box of text.

Do you share your email? Have you explicitly listed contact details in your profile?

[scoot]

Reddit style reply notifications might be helpful. It's easy to miss a reply to ones own comments. Knowing this is true for others discourages revisiting an old discussion with new learning and insight, as it won't be seen by those involved in the original conversation, never mind a wider audience.

[joefreeman]

I understand that notifications could be helpful in some cases, but I actually like the fact that people don't get notified when someone replies to their comment, and I had assumed this was deliberate. It seems to make debates more objective. For example, if user A makes a statement, and then B disagrees, I like the fact that C can come along and backup A's points, rather than a defensive response from A. (Having notifications that were delayed by an hour or so might make for a good middle ground.)

[Pyrodogg]

It would definitely be nice to have as part of HN itself. In the meantime there is http://hnnotify.com/

[tomjen3]

Agree and this is a place where HNNotify doesn't really work - this feature is only useful if most people use it because otherwise you are not going to make the comment in the first place.

[blumkvist]

As noted, HNNotify, but the OP did not talk about this. After some time threads are closed and you cannot comment on them any more. OP suggests people leave contact info in their profiles, in case somebody stumbles onto your comments and wants to talk to you for some reason.

[zupa-hu]

I think an explanation next to all fields on the personal settings page would be great.

For example, when I first landed there, noprocrast just made me feel like an outsider. What the heck is that? Okay, english is not my mother-tongue, I didn't even know the word procrastination. Let's add some entrepreneur thinking: if I don't know what it means, nobody does! ^^

[a3n]

This is probably the best proposed, and least intrusive, solution to what may or may not be a problem.

[dang]

It's probably not the sort of thing that should be formalized, yet I feel that HN could be bringing people together more than it currently does. I wonder what new things could be tried.

[danmaz74]

> It's probably not the sort of thing that should be formalized, yet I feel that HN could be bringing people together more than it currently does.

Completely agree on this. Sometimes I even thought that the lack of the typical features that help creating "relationships" here was by design, to make it more difficult build coalitions/voting rings/subgroups.

What about simply adding private messaging? With an opt-out option for the receiver and a (low) minimum karma threshold for the sender, just to make it more difficult to create spam bots.

[karmacondon]

Adding a new profile field that says "contact email (optional)" seems like it might actually help a lot.

[brudgers]

As much as I value the idea of anonymity, people who want to be contacted can put that information in their profile. And many people do.

The amount of effort required to reach anyone who provides information in their profile feels about right. Contacting someone should be deliberate not reactive. If Googling or cutting and pasting a link is too much work, It can't be that important.

[walterbell]

How about a 'private follow' capability that maps to a list of all stories with at least one comment from someone on your private follow list? Avoids public popularity metrics yet enables filtering and possibly engagement that spans stories.

[jacquesm]

A sticky 'meet-ups' tab perhaps?

[jacquesm]

I've seen periodic rashes of emails from people with proposals or trying to promote stuff with generic emails I'm not even remotely interested in that I can trace back to my address being scraped from HN, this is a pity because it made me consider removing my contact details. I have no problem with personal approaches but the 'hustlers and growth hackers' can get on your nerves.

The large number of online and in-real-life friends I've made here ensured that it is still up and will stay up without any obfuscation or other gimmicks.

[iwwr]

Maybe HN needs a basic personal messaging system?

[lewisl9029]

I'd like to see this as an alternative.

This post prompted me to add a contact email (obfuscated to hopefully guard against automated scraping), but we really shouldn't have to do this.

[nfm]

Yes, I had no idea the email field isn't publicly visible. Thanks for the heads up :)

[dhimes]

Me, too. And I've been here twice as long!

[dorfsmay]

Hijiking this thread, since mine got no traction...

What would also be great is if HN provided a field to add our public keys.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9359536

In the meantime, if you put a website in your profile, add your public key somewhere in there.

[brudgers]

I've seen them in people's profile.

[EGreg]

Would anyone be interested if I made "profiles and notifications" for HN ... and you could follow people or topics?

I registered the domain name http://show.hn for just such an idea.

[dragonwriter]

> Many times I want to follow up on the discussion, to recount more up-to-date experiences, or to find out what happened so I can share in any discoveries made. People so often learn things, and so rarely come back to share them.

So: Blog your new experiences, submit them to HN, and (if this link is more relevant to HN than to readers hitting your blog otherwise) make a comment noting the relation to the previous HN discussion, with an appropriate link.

You don't need personal contact details to post a followup to a discussion on an open public forum.

[Pyrodogg]

I provide one for introductions that winds up in my 'real' inbox. I've made one great contact through it so far and hope to make more as time goes on. No issues with spam.

[dopeboy]

I share my contact details because I want to give people the ability to follow up with me privately on a submission or comment I made. HN is a wonderful community and I treasure its openness but sometimes you just want to be discreet about certain things. It's also a good way to prevent thread hijacking.

I'm also explicitly seeking someone right now (a co-founder) and leaving contact details gives an interested person a way to follow up with that.

[kijin]

A related reminder: If you're active on GitHub, have contributed to any FOSS project, or have participated in any mailing list (including Google Groups), your email address is probably public already. So you can stop worrying about spambots harvesting your email address. All the spambots know about you already.

[reitanqild]

Correct. For some of us it is more about not linking our hn persona with our email. There exist a number of reasons for why this is beneficial to some of us: woking at certain places, families with certain ideas, living in certain countries etc.

[freedevbootcamp]

LEO and the NSA would like it if you add as much personal information as possible, so please do that and help them out.