Quick Start
Operator | Search for |
---|---|
syften | the word "syften", "Syften" or "SYFTEN" (case insensitive) |
google apple | posts 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 root | the word "beer", but not if "root" is also mentioned |
title:domain title:name | posts 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:post | posts, i.e. the items that create new threads |
type:comment | comments, i.e. replies to posts |
`fmt.Printf("hi!")` | this exact string, without ignoring special characters. These are backticks, not apostrophes |
author:user1 author:user2 | posts by user1 or user1. Best used together with site: |
replyto:someuser | replies to this user. Use in conjunction with site:. This doesn't work for all communities |
tag:sometag | for use with multiple email addresses and Slack channels |
// blah blah blah | a 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`.
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`
Variables
If you need to manage multiple filters, you can make your life easier with variables.
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.
We scan the entire Reddit with all of its subreddits.
Use Cases
Limit the search to just a few sub-reddits.
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 campains
- 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:
- 3dprinting.stackexchange.com
- 3dprinting.meta.stackexchange.com
- academia.stackexchange.com
- academia.meta.stackexchange.com
- ai.stackexchange.com
- ai.meta.stackexchange.com
- alcohol.stackexchange.com
- alcohol.meta.stackexchange.com
- android.stackexchange.com
- android.meta.stackexchange.com
- anime.stackexchange.com
- anime.meta.stackexchange.com
- apple.stackexchange.com
- apple.meta.stackexchange.com
- arduino.stackexchange.com
- arduino.meta.stackexchange.com
- askubuntu.com
- astronomy.stackexchange.com
- astronomy.meta.stackexchange.com
- aviation.stackexchange.com
- aviation.meta.stackexchange.com
- bicycles.stackexchange.com
- bicycles.meta.stackexchange.com
- bioacoustics.stackexchange.com
- bioacoustics.meta.stackexchange.com
- bioinformatics.stackexchange.com
- bioinformatics.meta.stackexchange.com
- biology.stackexchange.com
- biology.meta.stackexchange.com
- bitcoin.stackexchange.com
- bitcoin.meta.stackexchange.com
- blender.stackexchange.com
- blender.meta.stackexchange.com
- boardgames.stackexchange.com
- boardgames.meta.stackexchange.com
- bricks.stackexchange.com
- bricks.meta.stackexchange.com
- buddhism.stackexchange.com
- buddhism.meta.stackexchange.com
- cardano.stackexchange.com
- cardano.meta.stackexchange.com
- chemistry.stackexchange.com
- chemistry.meta.stackexchange.com
- chess.stackexchange.com
- chess.meta.stackexchange.com
- chinese.stackexchange.com
- chinese.meta.stackexchange.com
- christianity.stackexchange.com
- christianity.meta.stackexchange.com
- civicrm.stackexchange.com
- civicrm.meta.stackexchange.com
- codegolf.stackexchange.com
- codegolf.meta.stackexchange.com
- codereview.stackexchange.com
- codereview.meta.stackexchange.com
- coffee.stackexchange.com
- coffee.meta.stackexchange.com
- communitybuilding.stackexchange.com
- communitybuilding.meta.stackexchange.com
- computergraphics.stackexchange.com
- computergraphics.meta.stackexchange.com
- conlang.stackexchange.com
- conlang.meta.stackexchange.com
- cooking.stackexchange.com
- cooking.meta.stackexchange.com
- craftcms.stackexchange.com
- craftcms.meta.stackexchange.com
- crafts.stackexchange.com
- crafts.meta.stackexchange.com
- crypto.stackexchange.com
- crypto.meta.stackexchange.com
- cs.stackexchange.com
- cs.meta.stackexchange.com
- cs50.stackexchange.com
- cs50.meta.stackexchange.com
- cseducators.stackexchange.com
- cseducators.meta.stackexchange.com
- cstheory.stackexchange.com
- cstheory.meta.stackexchange.com
- datascience.stackexchange.com
- datascience.meta.stackexchange.com
- dba.stackexchange.com
- dba.meta.stackexchange.com
- devops.stackexchange.com
- devops.meta.stackexchange.com
- diy.stackexchange.com
- diy.meta.stackexchange.com
- drones.stackexchange.com
- drones.meta.stackexchange.com
- drupal.stackexchange.com
- drupal.meta.stackexchange.com
- dsp.stackexchange.com
- dsp.meta.stackexchange.com
- earthscience.stackexchange.com
- earthscience.meta.stackexchange.com
- ebooks.stackexchange.com
- ebooks.meta.stackexchange.com
- economics.stackexchange.com
- economics.meta.stackexchange.com
- electronics.stackexchange.com
- electronics.meta.stackexchange.com
- elementaryos.stackexchange.com
- elementaryos.meta.stackexchange.com
- ell.stackexchange.com
- ell.meta.stackexchange.com
- emacs.stackexchange.com
- emacs.meta.stackexchange.com
- engineering.stackexchange.com
- engineering.meta.stackexchange.com
- english.stackexchange.com
- english.meta.stackexchange.com
- eosio.stackexchange.com
- eosio.meta.stackexchange.com
- es.meta.stackoverflow.stackexchange.com
- es.stackoverflow.stackexchange.com
- esperanto.stackexchange.com
- esperanto.meta.stackexchange.com
- ethereum.stackexchange.com
- ethereum.meta.stackexchange.com
- expatriates.stackexchange.com
- expatriates.meta.stackexchange.com
- expressionengine.stackexchange.com
- expressionengine.meta.stackexchange.com
- fitness.stackexchange.com
- fitness.meta.stackexchange.com
- freelancing.stackexchange.com
- freelancing.meta.stackexchange.com
- french.stackexchange.com
- french.meta.stackexchange.com
- gamedev.stackexchange.com
- gamedev.meta.stackexchange.com
- gaming.stackexchange.com
- gaming.meta.stackexchange.com
- gardening.stackexchange.com
- gardening.meta.stackexchange.com
- genai.stackexchange.com
- genai.meta.stackexchange.com
- genealogy.stackexchange.com
- genealogy.meta.stackexchange.com
- german.stackexchange.com
- german.meta.stackexchange.com
- gis.stackexchange.com
- gis.meta.stackexchange.com
- graphicdesign.stackexchange.com
- graphicdesign.meta.stackexchange.com
- ham.stackexchange.com
- ham.meta.stackexchange.com
- hardwarerecs.stackexchange.com
- hardwarerecs.meta.stackexchange.com
- hermeneutics.stackexchange.com
- hermeneutics.meta.stackexchange.com
- hinduism.stackexchange.com
- hinduism.meta.stackexchange.com
- history.stackexchange.com
- history.meta.stackexchange.com
- homebrew.stackexchange.com
- homebrew.meta.stackexchange.com
- hsm.stackexchange.com
- hsm.meta.stackexchange.com
- interpersonal.stackexchange.com
- interpersonal.meta.stackexchange.com
- iot.stackexchange.com
- iot.meta.stackexchange.com
- iota.stackexchange.com
- iota.meta.stackexchange.com
- islam.stackexchange.com
- islam.meta.stackexchange.com
- italian.stackexchange.com
- italian.meta.stackexchange.com
- ja.meta.stackoverflow.stackexchange.com
- ja.stackoverflow.stackexchange.com
- japanese.stackexchange.com
- japanese.meta.stackexchange.com
- joomla.stackexchange.com
- joomla.meta.stackexchange.com
- judaism.stackexchange.com
- judaism.meta.stackexchange.com
- korean.stackexchange.com
- korean.meta.stackexchange.com
- langdev.stackexchange.com
- langdev.meta.stackexchange.com
- languagelearning.stackexchange.com
- languagelearning.meta.stackexchange.com
- latin.stackexchange.com
- latin.meta.stackexchange.com
- law.stackexchange.com
- law.meta.stackexchange.com
- lifehacks.stackexchange.com
- lifehacks.meta.stackexchange.com
- linguistics.stackexchange.com
- linguistics.meta.stackexchange.com
- literature.stackexchange.com
- literature.meta.stackexchange.com
- magento.stackexchange.com
- magento.meta.stackexchange.com
- martialarts.stackexchange.com
- martialarts.meta.stackexchange.com
- math.stackexchange.com
- math.meta.stackexchange.com
- matheducators.stackexchange.com
- matheducators.meta.stackexchange.com
- mathematica.stackexchange.com
- mathematica.meta.stackexchange.com
- mathoverflow.net.stackexchange.com
- mattermodeling.stackexchange.com
- mattermodeling.meta.stackexchange.com
- mechanics.stackexchange.com
- mechanics.meta.stackexchange.com
- medicalsciences.stackexchange.com
- medicalsciences.meta.stackexchange.com
- meta.stackexchange.com
- meta.askubuntu.stackexchange.com
- meta.mathoverflow.net.stackexchange.com
- meta.serverfault.stackexchange.com
- meta.stackoverflow.stackexchange.com
- meta.superuser.stackexchange.com
- monero.stackexchange.com
- monero.meta.stackexchange.com
- money.stackexchange.com
- money.meta.stackexchange.com
- movies.stackexchange.com
- movies.meta.stackexchange.com
- music.stackexchange.com
- music.meta.stackexchange.com
- musicfans.stackexchange.com
- musicfans.meta.stackexchange.com
- mythology.stackexchange.com
- mythology.meta.stackexchange.com
- networkengineering.stackexchange.com
- networkengineering.meta.stackexchange.com
- opendata.stackexchange.com
- opendata.meta.stackexchange.com
- opensource.stackexchange.com
- opensource.meta.stackexchange.com
- or.stackexchange.com
- or.meta.stackexchange.com
- outdoors.stackexchange.com
- outdoors.meta.stackexchange.com
- parenting.stackexchange.com
- parenting.meta.stackexchange.com
- patents.stackexchange.com
- patents.meta.stackexchange.com
- pets.stackexchange.com
- pets.meta.stackexchange.com
- philosophy.stackexchange.com
- philosophy.meta.stackexchange.com
- photo.stackexchange.com
- photo.meta.stackexchange.com
- physics.stackexchange.com
- physics.meta.stackexchange.com
- pm.stackexchange.com
- pm.meta.stackexchange.com
- poker.stackexchange.com
- poker.meta.stackexchange.com
- politics.stackexchange.com
- politics.meta.stackexchange.com
- portuguese.stackexchange.com
- portuguese.meta.stackexchange.com
- proofassistants.stackexchange.com
- proofassistants.meta.stackexchange.com
- psychology.stackexchange.com
- psychology.meta.stackexchange.com
- pt.meta.stackoverflow.stackexchange.com
- pt.stackoverflow.stackexchange.com
- puzzling.stackexchange.com
- puzzling.meta.stackexchange.com
- quant.stackexchange.com
- quant.meta.stackexchange.com
- quantumcomputing.stackexchange.com
- quantumcomputing.meta.stackexchange.com
- raspberrypi.stackexchange.com
- raspberrypi.meta.stackexchange.com
- retrocomputing.stackexchange.com
- retrocomputing.meta.stackexchange.com
- reverseengineering.stackexchange.com
- reverseengineering.meta.stackexchange.com
- robotics.stackexchange.com
- robotics.meta.stackexchange.com
- rpg.stackexchange.com
- rpg.meta.stackexchange.com
- ru.meta.stackoverflow.stackexchange.com
- ru.stackoverflow.stackexchange.com
- rus.stackexchange.com
- rus.meta.stackexchange.com
- russian.stackexchange.com
- russian.meta.stackexchange.com
- salesforce.stackexchange.com
- salesforce.meta.stackexchange.com
- scicomp.stackexchange.com
- scicomp.meta.stackexchange.com
- scifi.stackexchange.com
- scifi.meta.stackexchange.com
- security.stackexchange.com
- security.meta.stackexchange.com
- serverfault.com
- sharepoint.stackexchange.com
- sharepoint.meta.stackexchange.com
- sitecore.stackexchange.com
- sitecore.meta.stackexchange.com
- skeptics.stackexchange.com
- skeptics.meta.stackexchange.com
- softwareengineering.stackexchange.com
- softwareengineering.meta.stackexchange.com
- softwarerecs.stackexchange.com
- softwarerecs.meta.stackexchange.com
- solana.stackexchange.com
- solana.meta.stackexchange.com
- sound.stackexchange.com
- sound.meta.stackexchange.com
- space.stackexchange.com
- space.meta.stackexchange.com
- spanish.stackexchange.com
- spanish.meta.stackexchange.com
- sports.stackexchange.com
- sports.meta.stackexchange.com
- sqa.stackexchange.com
- sqa.meta.stackexchange.com
- stackapps.stackexchange.com
- stackoverflow.com
- stats.stackexchange.com
- stats.meta.stackexchange.com
- stellar.stackexchange.com
- stellar.meta.stackexchange.com
- substrate.stackexchange.com
- substrate.meta.stackexchange.com
- superuser.com
- sustainability.stackexchange.com
- sustainability.meta.stackexchange.com
- tex.stackexchange.com
- tex.meta.stackexchange.com
- tezos.stackexchange.com
- tezos.meta.stackexchange.com
- tor.stackexchange.com
- tor.meta.stackexchange.com
- travel.stackexchange.com
- travel.meta.stackexchange.com
- tridion.stackexchange.com
- tridion.meta.stackexchange.com
- ukrainian.stackexchange.com
- ukrainian.meta.stackexchange.com
- unix.stackexchange.com
- unix.meta.stackexchange.com
- ux.stackexchange.com
- ux.meta.stackexchange.com
- vegetarianism.stackexchange.com
- vegetarianism.meta.stackexchange.com
- vi.stackexchange.com
- vi.meta.stackexchange.com
- video.stackexchange.com
- video.meta.stackexchange.com
- webapps.stackexchange.com
- webapps.meta.stackexchange.com
- webmasters.stackexchange.com
- webmasters.meta.stackexchange.com
- woodworking.stackexchange.com
- woodworking.meta.stackexchange.com
- wordpress.stackexchange.com
- wordpress.meta.stackexchange.com
- workplace.stackexchange.com
- workplace.meta.stackexchange.com
- worldbuilding.stackexchange.com
- worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com
- writing.stackexchange.com
- writing.meta.stackexchange.com
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.
- Ars Technica (feed)
- CNET (feed)
- Digital Trends (feed)
- Engadget (feed)
- Fast Company (feed)
- Human Parts (feed)
- Product Hunt Blog (feed)
- Slashdot (feed)
- Tech Republic (feed)
- The Ascent (feed)
- The Moz Blog (feed)
- The Startup (feed)
- The Verge (feed)
- Towards Data Science (feed)
- UX Collective (feed)
- UX Planet (feed)
- Yahoo News (feed)
- Yahoo! Finance Web Services (feed)
- freeCodeCamp (feed)
- Quartz (feed)
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.
- Adobe Support Community
- Adventure Rider
- Aerospike Community Forum
- Airtable Community
- Alteryx Community
- AnalystForum
- AppImage
- Arlo Community
- Asana Community Forum
- Asterisk Community
- Atlassian Community
- Automators Talk
- Bad Voltage Community
- BARF - Bay Area Riders Forum
- Big Nerd Ranch Book Forums
- Brave Community
- Bubble Forum
- Bugcrowd Forum
- Cake Software Foundation, Inc.
- Chef Mailing List
- Cinder
- CircleCI Discuss
- ClarionHub
- Codecademy Forums
- Couchbase Forums
- Discourse Meta
- Discuss Frappe/ERPNext
- Discuss Kubernetes
- Discuss the Elastic Stack
- discuss.pixls.us
- discuss.ProseMirror
- Docker Forums
- DroneTrest
- Dropbox Community
- Ducati Monster Motorcycle Forum
- Dynamo
- eBay Community
- Elixir Forum
- Elm
- Ember.JS
- Envato Forums
- Etsy Community
- Fractal Future Forum
- GameDev.tv
- GitLab Forum
- GNOME Discourse
- Go Forum
- Google Nest Community
- Grasscity
- Hacker Noon Community
- Home Assistant Community
- Homebrew
- Hopscotch Forum
- HubSpot Community
- Hugo
- Instructure Community
- Ionic Forum
- Jekyll Talk
- JuliaLang
- Keyboard Maestro Discourse
- Kodular Community
- Komodo IDE & Edit | Forums
- Let's Encrypt Community Support
- Linux Containers Forum
- Make Community
- Marijuana Passion
- Microsoft Community Hub
- Microsoft Power BI Community
- monday Community Forum
- Mozilla Discourse
- MPU Talk
- Nextcloud community
- Node-RED Forum
- Offshore Corp Talk
- OMA forum
- OpenNebula Community
- OpenWrt Forum
- Photrio
- Pipedrive Community
- PTC Community
- PyTorch Forums
- Qlik Community
- Real Time VFX
- realtimevfx.com
- Roll It Up
- Roots Discourse
- Ruby-Forum
- SailPoint Compass Community
- Shopify Community
- SmartThings Community
- snapcraft.io
- Softr Community
- Spiceworks Community
- Sublime Forum
- TalkTalk Community
- THCFarmer
- The Bump
- The freeCodeCamp Forum
- The Rust Programming Language Forum
- The SitePoint Forums
- The Stan Forums
- The Things Network
- three.js forum
- Thumbtack Community
- Travis CI Community
- Ubuntu Community Hub
- Ubuntu MATE Community
- Upwork Community
- UrBackup - Discourse
- Webflow Forums
- Xenforo Community
- Zoom Developer Forum
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.
- First 1000 <first1000@substack.com>
- Not Boring <notboring@substack.com>
- taylor@nocodedevs.com <nocodedevs@mail.beehiiv.com>
- Mohamed Labouardy from DevOps Bulletin <devopsbulletin@substack.com>
- Story Alley <salley@substack.com>
- Analytics Engineering Roundup <analyticsengineeringroundup+the-analytics-engineering-podcast@substack.com>
- The Observability Digest <reply@www.masteringobservability.com>
- Lex Neva <lex@sreweekly.com>
- Observability 360 <observability-360@mail.beehiiv.com>
- taylor@nocodedevs.com <nocodedevs@mail.nocodedevs.com>
- Help a B2B Writer <hi@helpab2bwriter.com>
- Project Overwatch <project-overwatch@mail.beehiiv.com>
- Anne-Laure Le Cunff <annelaure@nesslabs.com>
- The Pragmatic Engineer <pragmaticengineer@substack.com>
- Dave Kline @ MGMT Playbook <mgmt@mail.beehiiv.com>
- The Team at Inside <announcements@inside.com>
- Corey Haines | Swipe Files <corey@swipefiles.com>
- Jean from Another PM Day <Jean@mail.anotherpmday.com>
- Justin Jackson <justin@megamaker.co>
- Stefan from Daily AI Brief <ai-brief@mail.beehiiv.com>
- Lenny's Newsletter <lenny@substack.com>
- Snacks <hello@snacks.robinhood.com>
- Marie Doll_ from In Bed With Social <maried@substack.com>
- The Pragmatic Engineer <pragmaticengineer+the-pulse@substack.com>
- Technically <technically@substack.com>
- Python Weekly <rahul@pythonweekly.com>
- Sylvain | Growth Gems <growthgems@substack.com>
- observability news <o11y.news@buttondown.email>
- Embrace Risk - the SREs newsletter <embracerisk@substack.com>
- Substack <no-reply@substack.com>
- The Pragmatic Engineer <pragmaticengineer+deepdives@substack.com>
- Analytics Engineering Roundup <analyticsengineeringroundup@substack.com>
- Allan Mann <reply@www.masteringobservability.com>
- Jason Dixon <jason@monitoring.love>
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... |
---|---|
syften | mentions of Syften |
+keyword | YouTube search is designed to grab your attention, not to provide accurate results. Use the plus operator to make sure a keyword is really included |
-keyword | Exclude a keyword |
a OR b | Either of these two words. The precedence of this operator is counterintuitive for technical people, so use parenthesis () liberally when using OR |
$1000 $100..$1000 | YouTube has an operator to search for dollar amounts. This will match e.g. "$1,000", but will also match "$100M" or "$100 million" |
intitle: | Limit search to the title |
description: | Limit search to the description |
"the * seo" | Will match "the power of SEO" |
#seo | Hashtag search |
tag:yourtag | this 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 parenthesis () 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
Quora Pro
Use Cases
Listen for questions containing the keyword "seo"
site:quora.com type:post "seo"
Listen for answers containing your company name
site:quora.com type:comment syften
Implementation Details
- Alerts are available with an up to 12 hour delay
- Edits are not tracked
- Due to the technical nature of Quora, some more advanced Syften filter expressions might not work (e.g. "*ession" will miss mentions of "expression" on Quora)
- Because we only look for configured keywords on Quora, the archive preview is far from complete
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
- all-about-saas.slack.com
- apache-iceberg.slack.com
- apisyouwonthate.slack.com
- backlinks.slack.com
- bigseoreddit.slack.com
- bundler.slack.com
- citus-public.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
- ecommercelabs.slack.com
- ecommtalk.slack.com
- getdbt.slack.com
- gophers.slack.com
- grafana.slack.com
- growmance.slack.com
- growthband.slack.com
- intl-business.slack.com
- itpoolparty.slack.com
- kubernetes.slack.com
- launch-chat.slack.com
- limitedsupply.slack.com
- linearcustomers.slack.com
- locallyoptimistic.slack.com
- macadmins.slack.com
- marketer.slack.com
- measure.slack.com
- microconfconnect.slack.com
- micrometer-metrics.slack.com
- mindtheproduct.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
- owasp.slack.com
- phpchat.slack.com
- pigeonhack.slack.com
- platformengin-b0m7058.slack.com
- port-community.slack.com
- prefect-community.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
- revopscoop.slack.com
- rubyonrails-link.slack.com
- sales-enablement-all.slack.com
- serialmarketers.slack.com
- shopifypartners.slack.com
- startupcpg.slack.com
- superpathcommunity.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
- 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, and the Username may be different in every Slack community.
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 now | containing both "watching" and "now". This is the default operator |
happy hour | containing the exact phrase "happy hour" |
love OR hate | containing either "love" or "hate" (or both) |
beer -root | containing "beer" but not "root" |
#haiku | containing the hashtag "haiku" |
from:NASA | sent from Twitter account "NASA" |
nasa -@NASA | mentioning "nasa", but not the Twitter account "NASA" |
puppy -is:retweet | containing "puppy", filtering out retweets |
puppy -is:reply | containing "puppy", filtering out replies |
puppy -is:quote | containing "puppy", filtering out Quote Tweets |
is:verified | limit to verified accounts |
has:hashtags has:links has:mentions has:media has:images | self explanatory |
lang:en | this parameter restricts Tweets to the given language |
tag:yourtag | this 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 -@syften_com -from:@syften_com lang:en
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 parenthesis () liberally to explicitly show what you mean. Otherwise, you might receive unexpected results. a b OR c should become a (b OR c)
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