Documentation

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:

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.

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

Hacker News posting guide

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.

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

Finding your first few customers on forums (Zapier story)

Newsletters and mailing lists

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

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
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
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

How To Launch on Product Hunt Multiple Times

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