# Track mentions on Hacker News, GitHub and Reddit Updated September 2026 Almost every developer-tool company arrives at the same problem in the same order: someone spots a Hacker News thread two days late, then a GitHub issue recommending a competitor, then a Reddit comment asking whether your API still has the limit you removed last quarter. This page is about running that job properly, whichever tool you use. ## Quick answer MarketHQ covers all three sources natively and sorts the results, but the strategy is the same whichever tool you use: track four kinds of keyword (your brand, your competitors, the problem you solve, and the integrations you plug into) across Hacker News, GitHub and Reddit, deliver the matches to one place your team already reads, and triage by what a mention is rather than where it came from. Free tools cover part of this; the expensive part is the reading. - Brand-only tracking misses most of the useful threads. - GitHub is where the comparisons get specific, and most alert tools do not cover it. - One channel, once a day, beats four real-time feeds nobody opens. - A mention is only worth catching if someone will answer it. ## What sources does MarketHQ cover? Free: Hacker News, GitHub, RSS, Stack Overflow, Dev.to, Lobsters. Paid plans add Reddit, LinkedIn, YouTube, X, Quora, Web, Perplexity, Product Hunt, Broader web crawl, Bluesky. - Grouped Slack daily digest - Drafted replies from your own strengths - Gap analysis and action plans - Weekly AI-answer visibility (paid plans) - Chat over your own evidence - API and MCP on every paid plan - Flat capacity pricing, tiers differ by tracking volume only - 7-day trial for $0.99 on paid plans - Free tier with no card and no end date ## Which keywords should you actually track? Four groups: your brand and its misspellings, your two or three real competitors, the problem phrase people use before they know your name, and the integrations you sit next to. Brand-only tracking is the common mistake. It catches people who already know you, which is the smallest and least actionable group. The problem phrase ("connection pooling", "webhook retries", "OTel collector") catches people at the moment they are choosing, before any vendor name is in the thread. Competitor names catch the comparison threads, which are the ones where a factual correction from a maintainer is welcome and a sales pitch is not. Integration names catch the adjacent conversations: someone wiring your category into Next.js or Terraform is a buyer who has not thought of you yet. - Brand plus misspellings and the old product name you renamed. - Two or three competitors, not twelve. - The problem phrase in the words a developer would use. - The frameworks, clouds and tools you integrate with. ## How do you track Hacker News mentions? Watch posts and comments, not just front-page stories, and accept that the thread you care about is usually a comment three levels down on someone else's launch. The front page is the part everyone watches and the least useful for this job. The valuable mentions are in comment threads on adjacent stories: a "what are you using for X" thread, a competitor's Show HN, a postmortem where someone names the tool they switched from. Timing matters most here. A Hacker News thread does most of its traffic in hours, so a daily digest is fine for knowing what happened and useless for taking part. If you intend to reply, you need the alert the same day. ## How do you track GitHub mentions? Watch issues, pull request discussion and repository content for your name and your competitors', because that is where comparisons stop being opinions and start being specifics. GitHub is the source most alert tools skip, and for a developer-tool company it is often the highest-signal one. A maintainer writing "we moved off X because of the rate limits" in an issue is a documented reason, visible to everyone who finds that issue later, long after the thread is cold. It is also where you find out you are in someone's dependency list, someone's migration guide, or someone's list of tools that did not work. All three are worth a reply, and the second two are worth a docs change. ## How do you keep Reddit alerts from becoming noise? Filter by subreddit before you filter by sentiment, and exclude the obvious collisions between your product name and ordinary English. Reddit produces the highest volume and the lowest average signal of the three. Most of what a raw keyword match returns is a name collision, a bot, or a thread in an unrelated subreddit. The fix is boring: constrain to the subreddits where your buyers post, require a co-occurring term for ambiguous brand names, and drop link-only posts. What survives is small enough to read. ## What do you do with a mention once you have it? Sort it by what it is: a comparison, a complaint, a support question, or a recommendation. Each one has a different correct response. A comparison thread wants a factual correction from someone who says who they work for. A complaint wants an acknowledgement and, if it is fair, a fix. A support question wants an answer with a link to the doc that should have covered it. A recommendation wants a thank you at most. This is the step tools usually leave to you, and it is where the time goes. MarketHQ sorts the digest by category, drafts a reply grounded in what your product actually does, and rolls recurring gaps into an action plan. It also tracks weekly how AI assistants answer the buying questions in your category. ## When are the free tools enough? When you track one or two keywords, only need Reddit and Hacker News, and someone will read every email. F5Bot's free plan covers five keywords across Reddit, Hacker News and Lobsters with email delivery, no credit card required, and Google Alerts covers the open web at no cost. Together they answer the basic version of this question for nothing, and if that is your situation you should use them and spend the money elsewhere. They stop being enough at a predictable point: when you need GitHub or Stack Overflow in the feed, when ambiguous keywords make the email unreadable, or when the alerts arrive and nobody opens them. ## Limits: what will this not catch? Public posts only, and only in the places you point it at. A private Slack, a Discord server, a customer call, a closed-source repo: none of it shows up in any of these feeds. Deleted and edited comments are gone too. MarketHQ adds GitHub and Stack Overflow and sorts the pile, but Reddit, the social lanes and the weekly AI-visibility check sit on paid plans, from Lite at $29 a month. And a reply still needs a person who knows the product to send it. ## What does a week of this look like in practice? A handful of threads worth answering, buried in a larger pile that has to be sorted first. The numbers are illustrative, not measured. Illustrative: a five-person team selling a managed queue tracks its brand, two competitors, "message ordering" and "dead letter queue" across Hacker News, GitHub and Reddit. Say that returns roughly 130 matches in a week. Sorted, that might be about 70 irrelevant collisions, 30 passing mentions that need nothing, 20 support questions already answered by the docs, 6 competitor comparisons, and 4 complaints. The 6 comparisons and 4 complaints are the week's actual work, maybe ninety minutes of writing. Everything before that is sorting, and sorting is the part worth automating. ## FAQ ### What is the best way to track mentions of my API on Hacker News? Track posts and comments, not just front-page stories, using your brand, your competitors and the problem phrase people use before they know you. Get the alert the same day if you intend to reply, since Hacker News threads do most of their traffic within hours. ### Can I monitor GitHub for mentions of my product? Yes, and it is usually worth more than Reddit for a developer tool, because issues and pull request discussion state concrete reasons people chose or left a tool. Most keyword-alert services skip GitHub. MarketHQ covers it alongside Hacker News, Reddit, Stack Overflow, Dev.to, Lobsters and RSS. ### How do I stop Reddit alerts from being noise? Constrain to the subreddits where your buyers post, require a second term alongside ambiguous brand names, and drop link-only posts. Filter by place before you filter by sentiment. Raw keyword matching on Reddit returns mostly name collisions, bots and off-category threads. ### Should I reply to every mention? No. Reply to comparison threads where a fact is wrong, to complaints you can acknowledge or fix, and to support questions your docs should have answered. Skip plain recommendations. Always say who you work for; developer communities forgive a vendor who is upfront and punish one who is not. ### Do free tools cover Hacker News, GitHub and Reddit? Not all three on one free alert tool. MarketHQ's free tier covers Hacker News, GitHub and Stack Overflow (Reddit is paid). F5Bot free covers Reddit, Hacker News and Lobsters but not GitHub. Google Alerts covers the open web only. ## Related - [MarketHQ vs Syften](https://markethq.ai/compare/markethq-vs-syften) — the two tools that cover all three sources, compared row by row - [F5Bot alternatives](https://markethq.ai/alternatives/f5bot-alternatives) — if you are starting from the free email-alert setup - [Syften alternatives](https://markethq.ai/alternatives/syften-alternatives) — if you already pay for monitoring and want the wider field - [Best developer community monitoring tools](https://markethq.ai/best/developer-community-monitoring-tools) — the whole category, judged the same way - [All use cases](https://markethq.ai/use-cases) — the other jobs this product is bought for - [Pricing](https://markethq.ai/pricing) — what the four MarketHQ tiers cost ## Sources - F5Bot home page: https://f5bot.com/ (verified 2026-09-13) - F5Bot plans: https://f5bot.com/tiers (verified 2026-09-13) - Google Alerts: https://www.google.com/alerts (verified 2026-09-13)