[gdl]

That's what social bookmarking sites (like del.icio.us) are for. When I make the choice to come to a news site I'd rather see news, or at least current discussion relating to a "classic" link. If I instead see a bunch of old links without any active discussion attached, I'm quickly going to find another place to get my news.

[amichail]

Why wouldn't the old links have an active discussion? Perhaps not as active as the news, but still active.

[mechanical_fish]

New comments have to compete with old ones on the page. Once a page hits one million words it is pretty much done, unless there's a mechanism by which it gets edited, condensed, summarized, or updated.

One technique that has been tried is giving every visitor the power to edit, summarize, or update the entire page. That's the Wikipedia model. But, of course, you lose the history of the conversation [1], and the individual voices, and you're subject to the editorial whims of whoever happens by.

Another idea is to keep the content in the form of discrete comments but allow visitors to rearrange the comments. That's kind of how Stack Overflow works. The HN voting system also serves to rearrange comments on the page. These things are kind of indirect, though, and they do nothing to deal with the volume problem. Words take time to read; you have to cut down the supply somehow, and that inevitably requires some rewriting as well as cherry-picking.

Or you could just periodically archive the discussion and start it over with a fresh page, ending up with a series of discussions, each lasting only a day or two, but possibly related to or built on predecessor discussions that stretch back into history. This is pretty much how HN works.

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[1] Yeah, there are edit logs. Most people don't read those for fun. Most of the events in an edit log are tedious and unenlightening, like reading raw Postscript source.

[gdl]

With news, or when old links are posted on news sites, the fact that it was just recently posted means that there will be a lot of people focused on it at that specific point in time, and in turn conversations can play out on the forum over the next several hours. There's a value to being able to have more-or-less realtime conversations like that going.

If the old links were just kind of hanging around the news page, without anything to suggest that they're specifically relevent to the moment, it would be hard for them to attract the kind of time-focused attention that you would get from a freshly-posted item. You could probably get by with a "featured classic link" that changes every day or so to keep people interested, but that would be more of a small feature or gimmick than a new type of site. Trying to push it much more than that would, I suspect, thin out the commenters too much, killing the ability to have back-and-forth conversations and turning it into more of a bookmark site.

There's a place for collecting good, old links, but news sites are for news. I think trying to force both ideas into one site would feel too awkward to work well.

(But by all means, prove me wrong. I thought Twitter was stupid, too.)