Comment by pinkmuffinere 10 hours ago
Hey John, I'm just curious how people find these comments about "would be nice if X saw this" on HN. I don't think there's any pinging behavior. Did somebody message you? Did you just happen to read it? Do you have an eldritch curse that summons you when called by name?
Somebody subscribed to my blog with ref to hacker news so i just poked my head in :-)
I bet Musk hacked something together (or has a column in TweetDeck if that's still around) that continuously searches for mentions. I wonder if there's a tool like that that covers more of the internet, although the primary users would only be famous people and/or their agents / social media staff.
Not who you're asking for, but generally I think it's just a case of the author also being an HN regular. Although, I suppose you could set up some Google Alerts for mentions of your blog posts.
I use f5bot.com, which monitors HN, Reddit, and Lobsters. (I have no connection to f5bot except being a happy user.)