Documentation

Quick Start

Operator
Search for
syftenthe word "syften", "Syften" or "SYFTEN" (case insensitive)
google appleposts mentioning both of these keywords, in any order
"my podcast"the phrase "my podcast"
site:reddit.com/r/startups/posts on the /r/startups subreddit. Multiple site: operators can be used, and will be logically ORed
plug*"plugin", "plugins", "plug"...
"good plug*"same as above, but for phrases. The star can only be placed at the beginning or end of the entire phrase
beer NOT rootthe word "beer", but not if "root" is also mentioned
title:domain title:nameposts with a title that includes both the words "domain" and "name"
title:"domain name*"posts with a title that includes the phrases "domain name", "domain names" etc
type:postposts, i.e. the items that create new threads
type:commentcomments, i.e. replies to posts
`fmt.Printf("hi!")`this exact string, without ignoring special characters. These are backticks, not apostrophes
author:user1 author:user2posts by user1 or user1. Best used together with site:
replyto:someuserreplies to this user. Use in conjunction with site:. This doesn't work for all communities
tag:sometagfor use with multiple email addresses and Slack channels
lang:enposts in English. See detailed explanation below
// blah blah blaha comment

The filter a.b.c will match, among other things, the text "A... b!c". That's because special characters are ignored and word boundary logic is applied. This is what you would expect from a Google search.

However, Syften is not Google and does not need to instantly search thought terabytes of data. We're only filtering once, through live data, delivering the matches and discarding the rest. This allows us some more CPU-heavy operations, like matching special characters. If you want to match special characters, like a text editor search would, surround your filter with backticks, like so: `a.b.c`.

Language detection

For language detection, we use the whatlanggo library. We reject posts only if the detector marks the result as reliable (confidence greater than 0.8). If you specify lang:en, but the library stays below that confidence, we will still deliver it to you. This is because language detection is often inaccurate for short posts, and we don't want you to miss anything important.

Supported languages are: ar, bn, cs, da, de, el, en, es, fa, fi, fr, he, hi, hu, id, it, ja, ka, km, kn, ko, ml, my, nb, nl, nn, or, pa, pl, pt, ro, ru, si, sv, ta, te, th, tr, uk, vi, zh.

Examples

Get mentions about Mailchimp but avoid utm-tagged links

mailchimp NOT `?utm_source=mailchimp`

Topics related to security on Hacker News

site:news.ycombinator.com type:post title:secur*

It's OK to listen to common dictionary keywords as long as you narrow down the search to specialised communities

site:reddit.com/r/msp site:mspvendor.slack.com windows

Questions about Wordpress themes, but not links to other themes

"wordpress theme*" `?` NOT `https://`

The filter "website.so" will match the string "I built a website, so I released it". Use this to match the dot literally, while matching on word boundaries (filtering out "mywebsite.so")

"website.so" `website.so`

How I monitor my own tool (Syften is a dictionary word in Swedish)

syften NOT lang:sv

Variables

If you need to manage multiple filters, you can make your life easier with variables.

Variable names must start with an uppercase letter; the remaining characters may be letters, digits, or underscores.

SOMEVAR=site:reddit.com/r/startups/ site:news.ycombinator.com
SOMEOTHERVAR=author:user1 author:user2

filter1 ${SOMEVAR}
filter2 ${SOMEVAR}
filter3 ${SOMEVAR}
filter4 ${SOMEOTHERVAR}

Site-specific syntax

Some communities have extra features and limitations. Technical details follow.

Reddit

We scan the entire Reddit with all of its subreddits.

Use Cases

Limit the search to just a few subreddits.

site:reddit.com/r/saas/ site:reddit.com/r/EntrepreneurRideAlong/ title:mrr type:post

Limit the search to posts (new threads) only, and skip comments. The example below will notify about each new thread started on the r/saas subreddit.

site:reddit.com/r/saas/ type:post

Find questions about a topic

site:reddit.com/r/shopify/ title:plugin title:`?`

Track Reddit users. This includes comments and posts. Paid ads are just promoted posts, so you can track a marketing campaign as well.

site:reddit.com author:someuser123

Implementation Details

  • Alerts are available with an up to 1-minute delay
  • Syften sees the content from the perspective of a logged-out user
  • A comment's title is reconstructed from the slug in the URL and may be slightly different from the posts's title
  • Item edits are not tracked
  • Reddit ads are just promoted posts, meaning that you can track ad campaigns
  • The replyto: operator is not supported
  • During very high traffic periods there may be delays

Resources

The Stack Exchange family of sites

We scan the entire Stack Exchange family of sites. Full list:

Use Cases

Get notified when someone mentions docker on Server Fault

site:serverfault.com docker

Get notified when someone replies to you

site:stackexchange.com replyto:yourusername

Implementation Details

  • Alerts are available with an up to 15-minute delay
  • Only questions (type:post) have a title
  • Syften sees the content from the perspective of a logged-out user

GitHub

Syften monitors GitHub comments and issues, but not code.

Use Cases

Get notified when someone mentions a project

site:github.com someproject

Implementation Details

  • Syften scans GitHub every hour
  • Syften monitors only these events: IssueCommentEvent, PullRequestReviewCommentEvent and CommitCommentEvent

Indie Hackers

Indie Hackers is a website and community focusing on helping entrepreneurs become profitable while remaining independent.

Use Cases

Get notified when your friend posts something

site:indiehackers.com author:csallen

Get notified about people working on Slack bots

site:indiehackers.com "slack bot"

Get notified when someone does a Product Hunt launch

site:indiehackers.com type:post title:"product hunt"

Get notified when someone replies to you

site:indiehackers.com replyto:yourusername

Implementation Details

  • Alerts are available with an up to 1-minute delay
  • Comments don't have titles
  • Item edits are not tracked

Blogs

We have an RSS backend pulling in some blog articles. A list of all scanned news sites and blogs follows.

Contact us if your favourite site is missing.

Implementation Details

  • Syften uses RSS to fetch new items. Some sites don't share full articles through this channel, only previews
  • Alerts are available with an up to 15 minute delay

Hacker News

news.ycombinator.com is a community-driven news site that allows users to submit links and create discussions. It focuses on startups and technology.

Use Cases

Get notified when a new official "Who is hiring?" thread gets created

site:ycombinator.com title:"Ask HN: Who is hiring?" author:whoishiring

Get notified when a new remote Go job is posted

site:ycombinator.com title:"Ask HN: Who is hiring?" remote go
site:ycombinator.com title:"Ask HN: Who is hiring?" remote golang

Get notified when someone from your team posts something

site:ycombinator.com author:user1 author:user2

Get notified about new Show HN threads

site:ycombinator.com title:"show hn: " type:post

Get notified when someone replies to you

site:ycombinator.com replyto:someuser

Implementation Details

  • Syften scans Hacker News using the official Hacker News API
  • Syften sees the content from the perspective of a logged-out user, missing out on censored content
  • Alerts are available with an up to 1-minute delay
  • Only posts have a title (comments do not)
  • Item edits are not tracked

Resources

Dev.to

Use Cases

Receive alerts whenever a thread is started or a comment is posted with the keywords you want to monitor.

site:dev.to yourproduct

Get notified when your favourite author posts something

site:dev.to author:favourite_author

Implementation Details

  • Alerts are available with an up to 1-minute delay

Forums

We scrape an assorted selection of forums running on different backends. A list of all scanned forums follows.

Contact us if your favourite forum is missing.

Use Cases

Get notified about new Discourse paid jobs

site:meta.discourse.org title:`[paid-job]`

Get notified when your favourite developer posts something

site:discourse.brew.sh author:favourite_author

Implementation Details

  • Syften sees posts from the perspective of a logged-out user

Resources

Newsletters and mailing lists

Syften monitors some tech-related newsletters. A list of all scanned mailing lists follows.

Contact us if your favourite mailing list is missing.

Implementation Details

  • Alerts are available with an up to 1-minute delay

Podcasts

With the advent of powerful AI, we can now scan podcasts for mentions of your product.

Use Cases

Get notified when someone talks about your product

type:podcast syften

Implementation Details

  • Due to the nature of AI-generated audio-to-text conversion, alerts about keywords in the podcast body can be inaccurate. This is especially true for non-dictionary startup names and domain names. Podcast descriptions are still accurate
  • Alerts are available within 15 minutes of an episode being released, but this can vary with load
  • Around 35,000 episodes are scanned each day
  • Due to the large volume, podcasts are not stored in the archive
  • Podcasts have the special type:podcast

YouTube Pro

Monitoring YouTube is completely separate from the other communities. We use the standard YouTube syntax, shown below.

Operator
Look for...
syftenmentions of Syften
+keywordYouTube search is designed to grab your attention, not to provide accurate results. Use the plus operator to make sure a keyword is really included
-keywordExclude a keyword
a OR bEither of these two words. The precedence of this operator is counterintuitive for technical people, so use parentheses () liberally when using OR
intitle:Limit search to the title
description:Limit search to the description
"the * seo"Will match "the power of SEO"
#seoHashtag search
tag:yourtagthis is a special Syften-specific operator used to tag your filters

Implementation Details

  • Results are checked at least once per day
  • The precedence of the OR operator is counterintuitive for technical people, so use parentheses () liberally when using OR
  • The completeness of our results is at the mercy of the YouTube attention-grabbing algorithm. If it deems a video not worthy of appearing in search results, we will miss it. We do not analyze the contents of the videos.

Slack Communities

We monitor a wide variety of publicly available Slack communities.

The title of a Slack message is arbitrarily constructed, and contains some useful information for filtering. Here is an example:

message from john.travolta (U01A1RHH5B7) in techlondon.slack.com/#tech

Full list of monitored Slack communities. Contact us if your favourite community is missing.

  • acquiredfm.slack.com
  • adtechgodcommunity.slack.com
  • airbytehq.slack.com
  • all-about-saas.slack.com
  • apache-iceberg.slack.com
  • apisyouwonthate.slack.com
  • backlinks.slack.com
  • bazelbuild.slack.com
  • bigseoreddit.slack.com
  • bundler.slack.com
  • citus-public.slack.com
  • clayrunhq.slack.com
  • cloud-native.slack.com
  • confluentcommunity.slack.com
  • continuous-testing.slack.com
  • creatorsofproducts.slack.com
  • crohacks.slack.com
  • cube-js.slack.com
  • dagster.slack.com
  • dataqualitycamp.slack.com
  • datatalks-club.slack.com
  • devopschat.slack.com
  • dlthub-community.slack.com
  • ecommercelabs.slack.com
  • ecommtalk.slack.com
  • emailgeeks.slack.com
  • getdbt.slack.com
  • gophers.slack.com
  • grafana.slack.com
  • growmance.slack.com
  • growthband.slack.com
  • intl-business.slack.com
  • kubernetes.slack.com
  • langchaincommunity.slack.com
  • limitedsupply.slack.com
  • linearcustomers.slack.com
  • locallyoptimistic.slack.com
  • macadmins.slack.com
  • measure.slack.com
  • micrometer-metrics.slack.com
  • mindtheproduct.slack.com
  • mlops-community.slack.com
  • mspgeek.slack.com
  • mspvendor.slack.com
  • node-js.slack.com
  • o11y.slack.com
  • onlinegeniuses.slack.com
  • open-api.slack.com
  • openapi-generator.slack.com
  • oso-oss.slack.com
  • owasp.slack.com
  • phpchat.slack.com
  • pigeonhack.slack.com
  • platformengin-b0m7058.slack.com
  • port-community.slack.com
  • prefect-community.slack.com
  • presalescollective.slack.com
  • product-marketing-all.slack.com
  • product-school.slack.com
  • productled.slack.com
  • productledgrowth.slack.com
  • profitsociety.slack.com
  • pythondev.slack.com
  • rands-leadership.slack.com
  • revgenius.slack.com
  • rubyonrails-link.slack.com
  • sales-enablement-all.slack.com
  • serialmarketers.slack.com
  • shopify-matrixify.slack.com
  • sre-community.slack.com
  • startupcpg.slack.com
  • sylius-community.slack.com
  • techlondon.slack.com
  • techwellhub.slack.com
  • testautomationu.slack.com
  • theenablementsquad.slack.com
  • thehustleco.slack.com
  • theleaddeveloper.slack.com
  • themopros.slack.com
  • tidbcommunity.slack.com
  • tobiko-data.slack.com
  • trinodb.slack.com
  • video-dev.slack.com

Use Cases

You can search for very broad terms if you limit your search to Slack communities only

site:slack.com funnel

Limit search to just this one Slack community

site:techlondon.slack.com freelance

Channel tracking

title:`#marketing` "cold call"

We put the channel name in what is normally the title for other backends.

Track users

site:techlondon.slack.com title:U57JWU42T
site:techlondon.slack.com author:reginald

Unfortunately we can't easily tell what the "Username" (e.g. reginald) of a Slack user is and the "Display Name" (e.g. Reginald Terris) is optional and can easily be changed.

So to make identifying users reliable we put the User ID (e.g. U57JWU42T) in the title field. Additionally, to make it convenient to view, we put the "Username" in the author field.

Track replies to your messages

site:techlondon.slack.com title:U57JWU42T

To track replies to your threads, track your own Slack user. Keep in mind that the User ID will be different in every Slack community, and the Username may be different as well.

Learn from the best

site:slack.com marketingexamples.com
site:slack.com saasmarketer.io

See how the best do their marketing and learn from them. To avoid tracking their username across the different communities, you can just follow URLs to their websites.

Implementation Details

  • Alerts are available with an up to 1-minute delay
  • Since Slack messages have no title, we're constructing a faux one that looks like this:
    message from someuser (U012ABCDEFG) in somecommunity.slack.com/#somechannel
  • Item edits are tracked
  • Thread replies are tracked
  • The replyto: operator is not supported
  • It's inconvenient to track a user across multiple Slack communities, as their username may be different
  • The channel ID is included in the URL, and can be filtered with site: site:somecommunity.slack.com/archives/C12345678/

Twitter/X Pro

Monitoring Twitter/X is completely separate from the other communities. We use the standard Twitter syntax, shown below.

Operator
Find Tweets...
watching nowcontaining both "watching" and "now". This is the default operator
happy hourcontaining the exact phrase "happy hour"
love OR hatecontaining either "love" or "hate" (or both)
beer -rootcontaining "beer" but not "root"
#haikucontaining the hashtag "haiku"
from:NASAsent from Twitter account "NASA"
nasa -@NASAmentioning "nasa", but not the Twitter account "NASA"
puppy -is:retweetcontaining "puppy", filtering out retweets
puppy -is:replycontaining "puppy", filtering out replies
puppy -is:quotecontaining "puppy", filtering out Quote Tweets
is:verifiedlimit to verified accounts
has:hashtags
has:links
has:mentions
has:media
has:images		self-explanatory
lang:enthis parameter restricts Tweets to the given language
tag:yourtagthis is a special Syften-specific operator used to tag your filters

Use Cases

Here is how I would search for relevant tweets in English about Syften that didn't come from me and didn't mention my Twitter/X handle ("syften" is a dictionary word in Swedish)

(@syften_com OR syften) -lang:sv -from:@syften_com

Implementation Details

  • Alerts are available with an up to 15-minute delay
  • Syften does not support these operators: min_replies, min_faves, min_retweets
  • Syften does not support cashtags (e.g. $BTC)
  • The Twitter API and the Twitter web search define different OR binding precedence - the way the API behaves is counterintuitive. For this reason, if you use OR please use parentheses () liberally to explicitly show what you mean. Otherwise, you might receive unexpected results. a b OR c should become a (b OR c)

Bluesky

Bluesky is a Twitter alternative.

Implementation Details

  • Item edits are not tracked

Mastodon

Mastodon is a Twitter alternative.

Implementation Details

  • Item edits are not tracked

Product Hunt

producthunt.com is a product promotion website.

Use Cases

Get notified when someone comments on your product

site:producthunt.com replyto:yourproduct

Implementation Details

  • Syften scans ProductHunt every five minutes

Resources

Steemit

Syften scans Steemit using the official Steemit API.

Implementation details

  • Syften sees the content from the perspective of a logged-out user
  • Alerts are available with an up to 5 minute delay
  • Item edits are not tracked

Lobste.rs

Syften scans Lobste.rs using the official Lobste.rs API.

Use Cases

Get notified when someone talks about OpenBSD

site:lobste.rs openbsd

Get notified when your favourite author posts something

site:lobste.rs author:favourite_author

Implementation Details

  • Alerts are available with an up to 1-minute delay
  • Syften sees the content from the perspective of a logged-out user

AI Filtering Pro

After your filters match an item, you can optionally run a post-processing AI check before the notification goes out.

AI filtering only applies to Slack and email notifications. The archive, API, and www views still show every match, but API responses include the AI verdict fields so you can consume them programmatically.

We use the structured output approach from OpenAI. The AI analysis is decoded into this structure:

type OpenAIResult struct {
 Reject  bool   `json:"reject"`
 // The field below at your disposal. In your prompt, refer to it as "output comment field".
 Comment string `json:"comment"`
}

Here is a sample prompt that worked well for us in our tests. Modify it to mention your company and niche. Your full filter list will be automatically appended below the prompt.

You are a filter for posts from Reddit, Twitter, Hacker News, Slack, and other online communities.
I run a keyword-notification SaaS called Syften.

Your job:
- ACCEPT any post that mentions Syften, my competitors (see list below), or any situation where I could pitch Syften.
- Posts promoting competitors are HIGH-VALUE. Always ACCEPT them.
- ONLY REJECT spam: crypto pump spam, backlink-exchange spam, or irrelevant noise.

Output rules:
- Comment field must be as short as possible.
- If accepted: suggest a short reply I could post.
- If rejected: briefly explain why.

When you change your prompt you can quickly test it in the matches menu by clicking the "Refilter with AI" button.