Hacker News Keyword Alerts
F5Bot emailed exact strings. Semantic HN topics catch the thread that never used your name.
Hacker News keyword alerts are what F5Bot did. Semantic topics catch the thread that never used your string.
Exact match is honest and dumb. "Mercury" is a bank, a planet, and a metal. F5Bot will mail you all three if you asked for the bank. A competitor thread that says "the YC payroll thing" never contains your trademark. You still needed that thread. Keyword alerts were the 2014 answer. Meaning is the reason to switch.
When a keyword is still the right tool
Rare strings work. A unique product name. An RFC number. A CVE id. Keep a keyword-shaped topic for those. For everything else, describe the event. "Hacker News posts that compare [category] tools or accuse us of copying pricing." That is a topic, not a grep. Details on the old tool sit in the F5Bot alternative page. The HN workflow is in developer community monitoring.
AyeWatch is not a Boolean search box. You do not get AND/OR operators to babysit. You get a sentence. If the sentence is vague, the alerts will be vague. If the sentence names HN plus the claim you care about, the inbox stays small.
Cover Reddit in the same pass
The complaint often starts on HN and continues on r/programming or a niche sub. Add subreddit keyword coverage or brand mention monitoring so you do not run two inboxes. One topic can name both sites. One topic that says "the whole internet" will not.
Free Preview is six lifetime runs across three topics. Pro is $9 a month. Push for brand-risk threads. Email for stack gossip. Paid webhooks if a mention should open a Linear "reply on HN" ticket.
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Try AyeWatch freeRewrite the F5Bot list, do not paste it
If you had twenty keywords, do not create twenty topics. Cluster them. One topic per product. One per rival. One per stack. Keywords that were CVEs belong on a security topic, not an HN vanity list. You will get fewer mails and better ones.
Judge it on a miss F5Bot would skip
The winning alert is a thread that never used your string and still describes you. If you only ever get exact matches, the topic is too tight. Loosen the wording once. If you get jokes about mercury the planet, tighten. Then stop living in the newest tab.