Hacker News moves fast. A story hits the front page, gets a few hundred comments, and slides off again inside a day. If your company, your product, or your project comes up, you usually have a short window to notice and join in before the thread goes cold. Watching by hand means refreshing the site all day, which nobody has time for.
F5Bot is a free service that watches Reddit, Hacker News, and other sites for the keywords you pick and emails you when one comes up. This guide is about the Hacker News side of that.
F5Bot looks at the title of each story, the link it points to, and the text of the comments. A match in any of those gets you an email. The comments matter as much as the stories here, because on Hacker News the discussion under a post is often where your name actually shows up.
Some things worth setting up:
yourcompany.com, as a keyword. When
someone submits a link to you, or drops your URL in a comment, you hear about
it. This is the big one for Hacker News.Catching a submission of your own site early is the most useful alert on Hacker News. If your site makes the front page, the comment thread can send a lot of people your way, and being there to answer questions in the first hour is worth a lot. Find out late and the conversation has already happened without you.
If you only care about Hacker News, add the only-hackernews flag to a keyword
and it will skip Reddit and the other sites. If you want the opposite, watch the
same keyword everywhere and let the alerts tell you where each mention came from.
For trimming down a busy keyword, F5Bot's paid plans add include and exclude filters, and F5Bot's AI-powered filtering on the top tiers can judge a match by meaning. You could write something like "only show me threads actually discussing our product, not just linking to a page that mentions it," and let it sort the matches for you.
F5Bot's free plan is enough to watch your domain and a couple of keywords. The usual limits apply: a delay before alerts go out, no monitoring of the most common keywords, and a daily cap on matches per keyword. Since Hacker News threads move quickly, that delay is worth thinking about. The paid plans deliver in a timely manner, raise the caps, open up common keywords, and add the filters above. Compare them on the pricing page.
Make a free account, add your domain as a keyword, and you will hear about it the next time your site shows up on Hacker News. The Reddit keyword alerts guide covers the keyword and filter basics, and they work the same way across every site F5Bot watches.