Can KompWatch Monitor Competitor Mentions on Reddit, Hacker News, or Product Hunt?

Yes. KompWatch now includes community signal monitoring — it automatically scans Hacker News and Reddit for competitor mentions and surfaces them alongside your website change alerts.

What KompWatch Tracks

How It Works

Once community monitoring is enabled for a competitor, KompWatch scans Hacker News and Reddit once daily:

• Hacker News — uses the Algolia HN search API to find stories and comments mentioning the competitor by name, published in the last 24 hours
• Reddit — searches Reddit's public API for new posts mentioning the competitor across all subreddits

Each mention becomes a COMMUNITY change record in KompWatch. These surface in:

• Your daily or weekly digest — grouped with website changes under the competitor
• The dashboard — visible in the change feed with severity and confidence scores
• The MCP server — accessible via the get_changes tool if you use the API

Duplicate mentions (same URL appearing across multiple runs) are filtered automatically using a 48-hour deduplication window.

Enabling Community Monitoring

Community monitoring is controlled by the "Track community mentions" toggle on each competitor's settings page. It defaults to off. Enable it per competitor — it's most useful for direct competitors where HN and Reddit discussions influence buyer decisions.

Severity Scoring

Community mentions are scored by engagement so you know which to prioritize:

Hacker News:

Reddit:

HIGH-severity mentions flag situations like a competitor's product getting a viral Hacker News thread or a widely-upvoted Reddit comparison post — signals you want to see quickly.

Why Community Signals Matter

Community platforms surface competitive intelligence that never appears on a competitor's own website:

• Hacker News — Show HN posts and launch threads surface real-world user reactions, often before any press coverage
• Reddit (r/SaaS, r/entrepreneur, category-specific subreddits) — prospects and customers discuss frustrations, pricing, and alternatives openly

These signals are early and candid. A competitor getting criticized in a Reddit thread is often a more actionable buying signal than anything on their pricing page.

Product Hunt

Product Hunt isn't included in the daily cron yet. In the meantime:

• Add the competitor's Product Hunt page (https://www.producthunt.com/products/[slug]) as a KompWatch URL directly — KompWatch can detect changes to the description, review sections, and upvote areas using CSS selector .review-card or similar.
• PH also sends email notifications if you upvote a competitor's product, giving you real-time activity alerts.

Related: Social Media Monitoring · Monitoring Competitor Reviews · Reading Competitor Job Listing Signals · Tracking Competitor Funding and Acquisitions