Tech Community Monitor — Track Your Brand on Hacker News

Tech Community Monitor is a fast, reliable social listening and brand monitoring tool for tech companies. It tracks every time your brand, product, competitor or keyword is mentioned on Hacker News — stories and comments — so marketers, founders and product managers never miss a conversation. Built on official, open, unauthenticated APIs (the Hacker News Algolia Search API), there is no scraping, no browser, no proxies and nothing to get blocked. Enable monitor mode and it becomes a real-time Hacker News tracking and mention alerting engine: each scheduled run returns only the mentions that appeared since the last run — perfect for brand mention alerts, competitor intelligence and lead generation.

If you care about HN brand monitoring, keyword tracking, developer-community social listening, or turning Hacker News chatter into buying signals, this actor is for you.

Why this actor is reliable (and G2/Trustpilot scrapers are not)

Many "monitoring" actors scrape sites protected by WAFs and anti-bot systems, so they break constantly. This actor is different: it talks only to the public, open Hacker News Algolia API — the same API that powers HN's own search. It is officially exposed, unauthenticated, fast, and reliable from anywhere. No CAPTCHAs, no IP blocks, no fragile HTML parsing.

What you get for each mention

{
  "keyword": "apify",
  "source": "hackernews",
  "itemType": "story",
  "itemId": "48733650",
  "title": "10x more tools on x402",
  "text": null,
  "author": "jancurn",
  "points": 128,
  "numComments": 42,
  "url": "https://blog.apify.com/introducing-x402-agentic-payments/",
  "createdAt": "2026-06-30T14:58:31Z",
  "isNew": true,
  "scrapedAt": "2026-07-02T09:00:00Z"
}

For comments, itemType is "comment", text holds the comment body, title holds the parent story title, and url is the HN permalink to the comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=<id>).

How to use it

1. Add keywords — your brand, product, competitors, or any topic (e.g. apify, your-startup, postgres).
2. Pick what to search — stories (default on), comments (default off), or both.
3. Set the time range — e.g. last 7, 30 or 90 days.
4. (Optional) Filter noise — set minPoints to only surface stories above a signal threshold.
5. (Optional) Enable monitor mode — and schedule the actor (e.g. hourly or daily). Each run returns only NEW mentions per keyword. Wire a webhook to push new mentions straight to Slack, email, or your CRM.

Use cases

• Brand mention alerts — get notified the moment your product is discussed on Hacker News.
• Competitor launch tracking — watch for competitor Show HN posts and the discussion around them.
• Show HN tracking — monitor your niche for new launches and gauge community reception.
• Lead generation — catch "looking for", "recommend a", or "alternatives to" threads where prospects are actively seeking a tool like yours.
• PR & reputation monitoring — surface criticism or praise early, in comments as well as stories.
• AI agents via MCP — flat input and clean JSON output make this a drop-in tool for LLM pipelines and AI agents through the Apify MCP server.

Pricing

Pay per mention delivered — no subscription, no minimum. You only pay for the mentions actually pushed to your dataset. Keywords with zero results are never charged.

FAQ

Which sources does it monitor?

Today it monitors Hacker News (stories and comments) via the open HN Algolia Search API — the fast, reliable, unblocked core. The architecture is source-pluggable, so additional open communities can be added over time without changing how you use it.

How does monitor mode and webhook alerting work?

With monitorMode enabled, the actor keeps a per-keyword record of previously seen mention IDs in a persistent named key-value store (TECH-MONITOR-STATE). On each run it compares the current mentions against that record and outputs only the new ones (isNew: true). The first run for a keyword is a baseline (it records what already exists and pushes nothing), so subsequent scheduled runs surface only genuine new activity. Attach an Apify webhook to the run to forward new mentions to Slack, email, a CRM, or any endpoint the moment they appear.

What time range can I use?

Anywhere from 1 to 365 days via timeRangeDays. Only mentions created within that window are returned.

How does deduplication work?

Every mention has a stable, immutable ID (the HN objectID). The actor dedupes within a run (the same item can appear across paginated pages or across the story and comment queries) and, in monitor mode, across runs — so you never see the same mention twice.

Is this legal?

Yes. The actor reads a public, official, open API (the Hacker News Algolia Search API) that requires no login and exposes no private data. It is the same API that powers Hacker News' own search. There is no scraping, no rate-limit abuse, and no personal data collection.

How reliable is it?

Very. Because it uses official open APIs rather than scraping, there are no CAPTCHAs, WAFs, IP blocks, or brittle HTML selectors to break. Requests are simple JSON GETs that succeed from anywhere, which is exactly why this actor works live where WAF-protected review-site scrapers do not.

Can AI agents use this actor?

Absolutely. The input schema is flat and agent-friendly, and every Apify actor is consumable via the Apify MCP server, so AI agents can call this as a tool to monitor tech communities autonomously.