Get Slack notifcations for Hacker News mentions

Ever wondered why your open-source project is suddenly getting an unusually high number of Github stars? It might be that it’s been featured on Hacker News. With over 1.5 million monthly visitors it can lead to serious spikes in traffic if your project starts trending.

Hacker News was created by the infamous accelerator Y-Combinator and gives users the ability to post, upvote and comment on articles about technology companies and tools. It’s notorious for attracting developers and being a source of information for them.

Developers are known for not responding well to traditional marketing. They are selective about the communities they join and the news they consume. What does work well with them is building relationships around common interests.

That's why it is more important than ever to know who is posting about your project - so you can engage with them and attribute traffic. In this article we will run through how to get Slack notifications when your company gets mentioned on Hacker News, so you aren’t left confused where all this traffic is coming from and can react to comments faster.

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What you’ll need for this use case

• crowd.dev account with any plan - get started for free
• Internal Slack workspace (where we can send alerts)

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Step 1: Connect Hacker News to crowd.dev

To connect the Hacker News integration to crowd.dev you will need to open the Integrations page. Find the Hacker News integration and select “Connect”.

You will see two different input options: mentions and URLs.

• Mentions are the name(s) of your company or community (e.g. "crowd.dev")
• URLs are the different URLs that are relevant to your company and community (e.g. "https://crowd.dev/" and "https://github.com/crowddotdev")

Once you have input these variables, then click “Connect”. You should see a success popup indicating that Hacker News has been successfully connected. It will take some time to load the data, but once it is complete you will see all of your Hacker News activity on the Activities page.

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Step 2: Set up a Slack alert for Hacker News activities

In the last step, we want to make sure we get a Slack notification every time your company or project gets mentioned. To set up a Slack notification, go to the Automation section, click “Add automation”, and select “Slack Notification”.

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If you haven’t used the Slack Notifier app yet, click on “Install app”, which will redirect you to the Integrations page to authorize the Notifier app to your Slack workspace.

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Then we need to set up the following fields:

1. “Automation name”: Here you can input something like “Hacker News Alerts”

2. “Choose trigger”: For this alert you will need to select “New activity happened in your community”

3. Under “Filter options” you will see the following:

• “Matching activity platform(s)” select “Hacker News” 
• “Matching activity type(s)” select “posted”
• “Including keyword(s)”. We recommend you leave this blank

Once the above is complete, we can select “Add Slack notification”. This will result in a Slack message saying “crowd.dev notifier has been successfully connected.”.

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Wrapping up

Now every time someone posts about your project on Hacker News you will receive a notification on Slack. You will never be left wondering where all of the traffic is coming from, and you can successfully engage with developers that are interested in your project.

Did you know? You can use crowd.dev to setup alerts for activities on a dozen of other community and social platforms, including GitHub, Twitter, Discord, Slack, LinkedIn, Reddit, or DEV.