Hacker News Keyword Alert Monitoring
Find Hacker News stories and comments where technical people mention your product, ask for recommendations, launch alternatives, or reply to your account.
- Stories and comments from the official API
- Ask HN, Show HN, author, and reply filters
- Target delivery in under 1 minute
- Slack, email, RSS, API, webhooks
We are replacing our current stack because the alerting is too noisy and the pricing no longer fits a six-person team. Would love a simpler recommendation.
Last month on Hacker News
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What can Syften monitor on Hacker News?
Syften monitors public Hacker News stories and comments through the official Hacker News API. Filters can match keywords, phrases, domains, story titles, authors, content types, and replies to specific accounts.
Each alert preserves the discussion link and context so your team can decide whether to respond, investigate, or save the language for later.
Stories, comments, authors, and replies
Monitor HN broadly or narrow alerts to Ask HN, Show HN, a technical topic, a known account, or replies to your team.
The public, logged-out view
Censored content is not visible to Syften, and edits to existing HN items are not tracked.
Hacker News signals worth monitoring
HN is smaller than Reddit, but the useful moments often come with unusually specific technical, product, or founder context.
Ask HN demand
Stories asking for tools, vendors, examples, advice, or technical approaches in a market your team understands.
Show HN launches
New products and open source projects in adjacent categories, followed by positioning, objections, comparisons, and feedback.
Brand and domain mentions
Stories and comments that name your company, product, domain, documentation, blog posts, or launch pages.
Competitor discussions
Migration questions, pricing objections, complaints, comparisons, and implementation detail around known alternatives.
Reply notifications
Comments replying to your own HN account after you join a discussion, without repeatedly checking the thread.
Developer feedback
Bug reports, missing integrations, security concerns, confusing workflows, and hard-won technical opinions.
How Hacker News monitoring works in Syften
Separate the HN moments you care about, use source-specific operators to keep them precise, then route each story or comment to someone who can act.
Give each HN moment its own filter
Keep brand mentions, Ask HN demand, Show HN launches, tracked authors, and replies to your account distinct.
Use HN-specific context
Narrow with site:, title:, type:, author:, and replyto: so a common technical term only alerts in the right context.
Reject ambiguous matches
Add exclusions or an AI accept rule when a product name, acronym, language, or infrastructure term has multiple meanings.
Send the discussion while it is active
Deliver the story or comment to Slack, email, RSS, API, or webhooks, with a target delay of at most one minute.
Monitor the product first; classify the complaint second
Developers often describe a failed migration, missing API, pricing objection, or workaround without calling it “bad” or “frustrating.”
Start with a product, competitor, category, or concrete technical identifier. Then use an AI accept rule only when you need to distinguish a complaint, limitation, migration, or unresolved problem from neutral discussion.
Read the Hacker News participation guideProduct name, domain, competitor, database, framework, API, error, or integration.
Accept only when the author reports a limitation, failed workflow, migration, request, or reason to switch.
Reply only when your team can answer the technical question. Otherwise save the feedback and move on.
Hacker News keyword alert examples
These are Syften filters, not Algolia or Google queries. Keep broad brand monitoring, Ask HN discovery, Show HN launches, known authors, and replies separate so each alert has a clear job.
Brand and domain mentions
syften.comFind Hacker News stories and comments that mention a domain, including subdomains and common obfuscated forms.
Ask HN stories
site:ycombinator.com title:"Ask HN" title:monitoring type:postFind new Ask HN stories whose titles also mention monitoring.
Show HN launches
site:ycombinator.com title:"show hn: " type:postFind new Show HN launch stories without matching every comment that mentions a launch.
Replies to your account
site:ycombinator.com replyto:yourusernameReceive public HN comments that reply to your account after you join a discussion.
Use author: to track a known account and add exclusions or $accept: when a technical term is noisy. The filter-building guide covers the full syntax.
Search, dashboards, and live alerts solve different jobs
Choose based on whether you want to research past discussions, report on a broader market, or receive a specific HN story, comment, or reply automatically.
Research when you remember to look
Useful for retrospective research and one-off discovery. It does not continuously route every new matching story, comment, author, or reply to your team.
Measure themes and brand activity
Useful when the primary deliverable is a dashboard, sentiment, share of voice, or recurring report across larger social networks.
Receive precise HN conversations automatically
Useful when HN-specific filters, live delivery, recent archive checks, AI qualification, and routing to Slack, email, RSS, API, or webhooks matter.
Planning to join the discussion? Read the Hacker News marketing guide before you reply.
A small Hacker News feed should earn attention
Syften is a strong fit when someone on the team can answer a technical question, follow a launch, support a user, learn from an objection, or continue a discussion they already joined.
Operating since 2019
Check out what our customers are saying
At Rewardful, we're huge believers in word-of-mouth marketing. I've used most of the social monitoring tools on the market and most have a lot of noise in the results or miss important conversations happening online. Syften returns the most relevant social mentions with the least amount of noise out of all the tools I've tested so far. Their community listening is the best on the market and I love how you can fine tune by source.
I love that Syften monitors all the communities I am part of but don't have enough time to check all day. Now, I can check my email and see conversations happening on Twitter, Reddit, Indie Hackers, and many more places. It's incredibly useful. Worth every dollar.
We use Syften to react to people saying things about us on the internet every single day. It's a set once and forget tool that just helps your team keep your pulse on whatever it is you care about.
Syften is awesome. I use it for my business so I can monitor the brand, and participate in online discussions which can help us attract new customers. I also use it personally to keep track of niche subjects that I'm interested in like emerging tech and products.
We love Syften at PostHog and find it incredibly useful for listening to our open-source community. The Slack integration enables our entire team to find ways to connect with our users, whether it's the Marketing team sharing new content or the Engineering team answering technical questions. The filtering system is especially powerful and helps us separate the signal from the noise.
I've written a couple books and like to keep an eye on how and where folks are talking about them. Syften has helped me catch several key conversations that I otherwise wouldn't have seen. Even on the days without any notable alerts, I'm still happy to know that I haven't missed anything. A very useful tool.
Syften has become integral to our business. It allows us to monitor *and* respond in real-time using their super simple webhooks. For example, when people mention our competitors being expensive on Twitter, Syften finds it and enables us to respond instantly with Zapier. It's paid for itself many times over. It even helped us secure $5M in funding for one of our community members. Michael has been overwhelmingly supportive over the past 18+ months we've been a customer and we couldn't be more grateful.
I use Syften every day and have been for a year. I looked at various other social listening tools but they were mostly aimed at big brands and enterprise customers and carried a hefty price tag. Syften tracks all of the major networks that I'm interested (even ones the big tools don't) and it's affordable for businesses of every size. Every day I get an email digest of people talking about my product for me to take immediate action on.
I gather the mentions I get from Syften and add them to our customer sales and partner presentations to show how our product is gaining mindshare amongst users on Reddit and forums. These slides are very impactful.
Syften has been a great tool to understand in which communities my website is being mentioned, or topics relevant to my business. It allowed me to engage in meaningful discussions and to identify some important actors in my niche.
Syften has enabled us to keep an eye on the topics related to our product. We can easily track posts about discount codes, email marketing, and e-commerce. We can then suggest using our service, or just be helpful answering questions on subjects that we are familiar with.
Pricing
It pays for itself if you find just one customer (easy)
Entry
Keep an eye out for your product name
- Communities filters: 3A filter is a search query for mentions you want to track. Communities include Reddit, forums, Stack Exchange, podcasts, Hacker News, Indie Hackers, GitHub, Slack communities, mailing lists, and similar discussion spaces.
- Communities results: 100/day
- Web filters: 1The Web means public websites across the internet, including articles, changelogs, documentation, directories, product pages, and your competitors' blogs.
- Web results: 5/day
- Archive search: 7 daysSee who has mentioned you in the past. Click to read more.
Standard
AI filtering, API access, more filters, more archive, Slack integration, and optional Twitter and YouTube support
- Communities filters: 20A filter is a search query for mentions you want to track. Communities include Reddit, forums, Stack Exchange, podcasts, Hacker News, Indie Hackers, GitHub, Slack communities, mailing lists, and similar discussion spaces.
- Communities results: 200/day
- Web filters: 5The Web means public websites across the internet, including articles, changelogs, documentation, directories, product pages, and your competitors' blogs.
- Web results: 20/day
- Archive search: 1 monthSee who has mentioned you in the past. Click to read more.
- Slack integration
- Twitter monitoringPaid addon
- YouTube monitoringPaid addon
- AI filteringFilter noisy matches before they reach your alerts. Click to read more.
- API accessQuery results and edit your settings. Click to read more.
Syften PRO
More matches, more filters, unlimited archive, API access, and webhook support
- Communities filters: 100A filter is a search query for mentions you want to track. Communities include Reddit, forums, Stack Exchange, podcasts, Hacker News, Indie Hackers, GitHub, Slack communities, mailing lists, and similar discussion spaces.
- Communities results: 500/day
- Web filters: 20The Web means public websites across the internet, including articles, changelogs, documentation, directories, product pages, and your competitors' blogs.
- Web results: 50/day
- Archive search: unlimitedSee who has mentioned you in the past. Click to read more.
- Slack integration
- Twitter monitoringPaid addon
- YouTube monitoringPaid addon
- AI filteringFilter noisy matches before they reach your alerts. Click to read more.
- API accessQuery results and edit your settings. Click to read more.
- WebhooksPush new matches to your own endpoint. Click to read more.
- MCPConnect Syften to AI tools that support MCP. Click to read more.
Tailor made
We also offer custom solutions built just for you, whether it's integrating Syften into your product or supplying your marketing team with the right data.
Frequently asked questions
What is the best tool to monitor Hacker News for developer complaints?
Syften is a strong fit when you need individual Hacker News stories and comments about a product, competitor, API, integration, framework, or technical workflow delivered while the discussion is active.
Start with concrete names and identifiers, then add an AI acceptance rule if you need to keep only limitations, failed workflows, migration reasons, pricing objections, feature requests, or unresolved technical problems. Syften finds and routes the public conversation; it does not assign sentiment scores or automate replies.
Do you really search every Hacker News comment live?
Yes. Syften scans Hacker News using the official Hacker News API and aims for at most a 1-minute delay.
You can send matches to Slack, email, RSS, API, Zapier, or webhooks. The point is not to build another dashboard you forget to check. The point is to receive the thread while it is still active.
How is Syften different from Google Alerts?
Google Alerts is useful as a free backup, but it is not a reliable Hacker News workflow.
It depends on Google's index, so it can miss fast-moving comments and short-lived discussions. Syften monitors Hacker News directly and can alert on posts, comments, authors, titles, and replies.
Syften also supports public web monitoring, so it can cover broader web alerts from the same account.
Can Syften notify me when someone replies to my Hacker News comment?
Yes. Hacker News does not have native reply notifications, but Syften supports the replyto: operator for Hacker News.
For example, site:news.ycombinator.com replyto:yourusername can alert you when a public Hacker News comment replies to your account.
So what can Hacker News monitoring be used for?
Use it for brand mentions, domain mentions, competitor discussions, Ask HN recommendation threads, Show HN launches, replies to your account, and technical conversations where your team can help.
It is especially useful for developer tools, infrastructure products, open source projects, technical SaaS, and founder-led companies that sell to engineers.
How to configure Hacker News keyword alerts?
Start with your product name, company name, domain, and common misspellings. Those are the alerts you should not miss.
Then add competitor names, competitor domains, category phrases, and specific technical terms. Use title: and type:post for Ask HN or Show HN threads, and replyto: for replies to your account.
If a keyword is too broad, add exclusions or an $accept: filter so only relevant matches reach you.
Hacker News social listening? Sounds like it could get me banned
Syften does not post for you or automate engagement. It only alerts you when a public discussion matches your filters.
The risk comes from bad participation: drive-by promotion, asking for upvotes, thin comments, and turning every thread into a pitch. A useful reply that answers the actual question is a different thing.
Read the Hacker News marketing guide before replying in serious threads.
Do you support other communities, or just Hacker News?
Syften monitors the public web and these communities:
- The public web (articles, changelogs, documentation, directories, product pages, and competitor blogs)
- X/Twitter
- Indie Hackers
- Hacker News
- GitHub
- ProductHunt
- The Stack Exchange family
- Forums
- Lobste.rs
- Dev.to
- Steemit
- Various Slack communities
- Newsletters
- YouTube
- Podcasts
- Bluesky
- Mastodon
I have more questions.
Use the chat widget or email us at hello@syften.com (we'll reply within 24 hours).
Real-time community monitoring
One conversation can change what happens next
Be there when the right customer mentions your product, your competitor, or the problem you solve.
14 days free · No credit card · See recent mentions immediately