Conversations on HN are so quality and yet most of the world never sees this commentary. It'd be great if HN comments could be made to appear in the comment areas of the posts themselves. And here's why:<p>The conversation gets bifurcated otherwise. Some post authors will recognize and manually compensate by updating the post with a link to the HN comments but that requires awareness & manual intervention of the author. Granted, it can be argued that comments are already distributed amongst silos like Friend Feed, Twitter, FB, etc. But HN comments tend to be such high quality and they're only exposed to the sliver of people that happen to come to the post via HN. Making them sync to the comments of the post itself would expose the rest of the world to the high-quality discussion occurring here.<p>I'm no expert on how comments work but is there a way to implement this with minimal engineering by making use of the track back feature? What are the negative implications for doing so? If it's not possible or proper use of that feature, it seems like they could integrate w/ Disqus, Intense Debate, Wordpress, Typepad and Blogger and thereby cover 90% of the comment systems out there.<p>At any rate, this is how I wish it worked and it seems like there might already be a convenient mechanism for doing it.<p>Thoughts?<p>sean
Conversations being split can be a feature; I know vaguely what to assume when writing for the audience here, but not at random other sites to which my comment could be syndicated without my knowledge.<p>And if that other audience responds <i>there</i>, I may not know, and if that other audience arrives <i>here</i>, the quality differential you've observed may evaporate.<p>A tech blog did this with HN comments at one point and I registered my strong objections in that thread:<p><a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=639874" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=639874</a>