Hacker News Keyword Alert Monitoring
Monitor Hacker News posts and comments for brand mentions, competitor discussions, technical questions, link submissions, and replies to your account.
- Stories and comments
- Author and reply filters
- Slack, email, RSS, API, webhooks
- Archive search and AI filtering
Last month on Hacker News
Loading recent Hacker News coverage...
How Hacker News monitoring works in Syften
Hacker News moves through posts, comments, and replies. Syften watches the public stream, filters it with your rules, and sends the matches to the place where you can act on them.
Choose what matters
Track your product name, domain, competitors, technical topics, author names, Ask HN threads, Show HN launches, and replies to your own account.
Narrow the filter
Use site:, type:, title:, author:, replyto:, exclusions, and AI filtering to avoid noisy alerts.
Send alerts fast
Route matches to Slack, email, RSS, API, Zapier, or webhooks, with a target delay of at most 1 minute.
Reply while it is fresh
Join the discussion before the thread goes quiet, especially when someone asks for recommendations, compares tools, or mentions your work.
Follow replies
Hacker News does not notify you when someone replies. Syften can fill that gap with replyto: alerts.
What you can monitor on Hacker News
Hacker News is smaller than Reddit, but the signal is different. It is useful when technical founders, engineers, investors, and operators discuss tools, launches, infrastructure, hiring, pricing, outages, and difficult product decisions.
Brand and domain mentions
Catch posts and comments that mention your company, product, domain, docs, blog posts, or launch pages.
Competitor discussions
Watch competitor names and domains so you see comparison threads, migration questions, and complaints while the discussion is active.
Ask HN questions
Find posts where people ask for tools, vendors, recommendations, examples, advice, or technical approaches in your market.
Show HN launches
Monitor launch threads in adjacent categories, then learn from positioning, objections, competitors, and comments.
Reply notifications
Use replyto: to know when someone replies to your Hacker News comment, even though Hacker News itself keeps that workflow deliberately simple.
Technical support signals
Catch bug reports, confusion, integration requests, security concerns, and product feedback that never reaches your support inbox.
Hacker News keyword alert examples
These are Syften filters. Start with concrete names and domains, then add title, author, post/comment, or reply filters when you need a narrower alert.
| Goal | Example filter | What it finds |
|---|---|---|
| Domain mentions | syften.com | Mentions of your domain in Hacker News posts and comments. |
| Product name | "Acme Analytics" | Mentions of a multi-word product name. |
| Competitor mentions | competitor.com | Threads and comments where people discuss a competitor's domain. |
| Ask HN threads | site:news.ycombinator.com type:post title:"Ask HN" title:monitoring | New Ask HN posts about monitoring. |
| Show HN launches | site:news.ycombinator.com type:post title:"Show HN" title:database | Show HN launches that mention database in the title. |
| Title-specific alert | site:news.ycombinator.com type:post title:postgres | Stories with postgres in the title, without matching every unrelated comment. |
| Track an author | site:news.ycombinator.com author:someuser | Posts and comments by a specific Hacker News account. |
| Reply notifications | site:news.ycombinator.com replyto:yourusername | Public Hacker News comments that reply to your account. |
| Noise reduction | rust title:database NOT game | Database-related Rust mentions while excluding a noisy meaning you do not want. |
| AI filtering | postgres $accept:"true when the discussion is about database operations; false otherwise." | Adds an AI accept/reject check before Slack or email notifications are sent. |
Syften filters are designed for live alerts, not broad dashboard searches. The goal is to send you the Hacker News comments worth reading.
Hacker News alerts vs social listening dashboards
Most social listening tools are built for reporting: sentiment charts, brand dashboards, share of voice, and weekly summaries. That can be useful, but it is not the job most founders need on Hacker News.
Syften is strongest when you want a precise alert and a fast response path. A relevant Ask HN thread, competitor mention, or reply to your account should reach you while people are still reading.
Why not just use Hacker News search?
Hacker News search is useful when you remember to check it. It does not turn a new post, comment, or reply into a Slack or email alert.
Hacker News also does not notify you when someone replies to a comment. That simplicity is part of the site, but it leaves a practical gap for founders who join discussions and want to follow up.
If you are planning to participate rather than just monitor, read the Hacker News marketing guide.
Who Syften's Hacker News monitoring is for
The best fit is a team that sells to technical people and wants a small stream of relevant discussions, not a broad social media command center.
- Founders
- Developer tools
- Open source teams
- DevRel teams
- Technical marketers
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
Standard
AI filtering, API access, more filters, more archive, Slack integration, and optional Twitter and YouTube support
- 20 filtersA filter is a search query for mentions you want to track.
- Daily results: 200
- 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
- 100 filtersA filter is a search query for mentions you want to track.
- Daily results: 500
- 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
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 web-monitoring 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.
Because Google Alerts is free, you can still run it alongside Syften for broad web mentions.
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 these communities:
I have more questions.
Contact us at hello@syften.com or use the chat widget (we'll reply within 24 hours).
Never miss a mention again
Stay in the loop and see what people are saying about you, your brand, and your competitors — all in real-time.