remindme bot

[Darth-Coin]

Would be useful to have a reminder bot attached to a post.

Could be attached to somebody else post or your own posts or comments.
User could choose when should receive a short automated message. Could be hash blocks, halvings, days, years or hours.
The user that requested the reminder will receive a message in his notifications, but also will be attached to the original message as a reply.

And one important thing:

for each reminder should have a cost, depending on the time for example. But not so cheap. People will abuse it.

[ekzyis]

Could be attached to somebody else post or your own posts or comments.
User could choose when should receive a short automated message. Could be hash blocks, halvings, days, years or hours.

Yep, that's how I imagine it to work, too. Basically like on reddit:
You just ping the bot in a reply to something and specify in your message when you want to be reminded.

Example:

@RemindMe 1 year

The bot then replies to confirm and then you can pay the bot by zapping the reply. (Maybe this bot reply should only be visible to the author? Maybe this should be in a DM #56?)

When the time has come, the bot mentions you where you created the reminder. So it would leverage the notifications we already have for mentions.

You can also attach an message to the reminder. A bit like FutureMe.

should have a cost, depending on the time for example

Oh, interesting!

[Darth-Coin]

Yes, it could be also an additional step, when the reminder popup into author notification that if he wants to also post it into the original post, will have to pay the sats. If not, is just a simple personal reminder.

Make them pay!

[SatsAllDay]

I wonder if this is something that should be built-in to the platform itself, or standalone like the HN and unpaywall bots? Kinda makes you wonder about extension points, and where the line should land between built-in features and community-driven extensions.

[SatsAllDay]

Also, instead of driving the flow via a comment/reply, it could be an action in the overflow menu for an item (both posts and comments). By not using a comment for the reminder action, or the reminder follow-up itself, we would avoid triggering notifications for other users in the same item tree. Just a thought...

[ekzyis]

Kinda makes you wonder about extension points, and where the line should land between built-in features and community-driven extensions.

Haha, I mentioned the same in our internal slack. But it was less about "bots or built-in" but more about official bots vs community bots.

Currently, we don't provide good API access (no documentation) and authentication is weird for bots. For hn and unpaywall, I copy-paste the cookie for example. So if we want to go down the community road, we should work on #26 and provide documentation; API keys; a reference implementation for a library (as you mentioned in the past) etc.

Personally, I would love to see other people building bots on SN. But it's currently not a priority. Might make more sense later when we can provide a stable API and SN is "feature-complete" (with user-generated subs and other big stuff that is planned). JIT payments could also be improved for bot usage. Currently, how much an action costs is communicated via the UI which a bot does not have easy access to.

Also, instead of driving the flow via a comment/reply, it could be an action in the overflow menu for an item (both posts and comments). By not using a comment for the reminder action, or the reminder follow-up itself, we would avoid triggering notifications for other users in the same item tree. Just a thought...

That's a good point! That's why I had ephemeral replies or DMs in mind. The reminder action itself would still be visible to other users but maybe that is interesting. The reply from the bot however would probably be too much.

Another argument for bots (and not a built-in solution) is that I see bots on SN as "scaling SN in layers".
Imo, it's easier to leverage existing features to build bots than to change SN itself. If we can show the community what bots are capable of and provide a good DX, I think people will be able to build bots completely on their own. No need to ask for permission; they can provide value to the community as fast as they can write a bot :)

[huumn]

This could be implemented like our @delete builtin bot.

[huumn]

Was asked about this again and a few things occurred to me.

Given this is a notification at base, it's fairly straightforward:

1. queue remindme job
2. insert into a Reminder table
3. on dequeue, send push notification
4. add Reminder table to notification check and notifications query

model Reminder {
    ...
    itemId ...
    remindAt ...
}

[SatsAllDay]

This is exactly my thought as well

[SatsAllDay]

Looks like https://stacker.news/remindme is occupied (by @ekzyis , IIRC). Do we still want to use that nym to trigger this bot?

[huumn]

Yes!

[SatsAllDay]

Another question: should we delete the reminder (and the corresponding worker job) if someone deletes the item with the @remindme mention? Maybe only if the reminder has yet to happen?

[huumn]

Yes, I think that makes sense and would be consistent with my expectations should I use @remindme.