[kinofcain]

Can we not do this, please?

One of the reasons that HN comment threads are still mostly worthwhile when other sites and comment services are swamp fires is the community that has been built here.

That people have to come here to read and reply helps us form that community and our social norms.

Sometimes it's ok to remain a small club.

[whiddershins]

I am actually with you in that, my guess is: the ability to click directly on "reply" that goes to a comment with no context would encourage discussion that is less nuanced.

I love the embedding of the comments. I love the ability to click to come to Hacker News and read the whole discussion. I don't love that particular feature though and wish it would be removed.

It's my understanding that keeping a discussion board like this one high quality is a very demanding and delicate task relying on great algorithms and lots of moderator effort.

I could easily envision that feature creating an overload.

[forgetsusername]

>Sometimes it's ok to remain a small club.

Well, it appears that other members of this community have different ideas about what this community "should be". And that's okay too.

[sdegutis]

No, communities grow and evolve, it's inevitable. Trying to prevent that in order to avoid the problems it comes with is understandable, but ends up causing other problems in their stead.

[kinofcain]

It's how it grows, and whether growth is the priority.

Taking the HN comment community out of the context of the site makes it no different than any other drive-by commenting platform.

This thought process: "HN Comments are great. I want comments on my site. Other comment systems are terrible. I'll put HN comments on my site". Misses the point of why HN comments are great and why these comments-as-a-platform services have all resulted in the same level of awful, despite repeated and varying attempts to solve the problem.

Put a link to HN comments in your footer, bring them here, let the community and the mods help shape the discussion. Don't take the HN conversation out of context and splat it across the web.

If you want federated comments, use one of the existing, awful, toxic commenting systems that inevitably result from that sort of usage.

[franciscop]

This has been asked/answered before, but basically it's all about context/relevance. I am adding more networks so you can keep things relevant. Made a blog post about your Raspberry Pi/Node.js server/Elixir? Cool, then HN might be a good fit and you can add the tag `hackernews="31415926535"`. Is it a cooking recipe? Then add that https://www.reddit.com/r/Cooking/ 's link to your post. Actually Reddit is great for this since they have many different topics, but I focused first on improving HN's version since that's the site I use most (it's still an alpha/dev version but wanted some feedback from HN).

Definitely harming the HN community is something that has been mentioned several times which I didn't consider because of what I mentioned above, so I will take that into account when I publish the final version. I don't want to change/harm the community at all, just so other people can read the awesome comments that happen here.

[whiddershins]

As I stated in my above comment, I believe that encouraging visitors from one site to come directly to a comment (rather than the entire thread) specifically removes the context.

And that could be a bad thing, no?

[franciscop]

That is a really good point. Even though before clicking the Reply button they can see that comment and its parents, I agree that it would be a better idea to go to that specific comment in the thread instead of to the reply screen that has no context. I thought there was no way of doing it, but each comment has its own id so I'll just link to the `#ID` so even more context is added when clicking on "reply". Thanks for the tip!

[Terretta]

"... the awesome comments that happen here."

Happen here. In context. In the community.

[n72]

Controlling a community very rarely works. Best thing, IMHO, is to embrace the market, as it were, and assume something will come along to fill the space once occupied by the thing you loved before it morphed. In other words, try lobster.rs.