[Zababa]

Maybe this reasoning can be applied to Hacker News itself. The moderation probably plays a big part in the quality of the content found here. However, HN is also indexed on Google, has a few way to discover more ("past" button, seeing a user's comments or posts), and also has an excellent Algolia integration. For example, dang often refers to some of his previous posts using this: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que.... I wonder if all those things that make the information longer lasting also raise the average quality.

[layer8]

Honestly, HN is still badly suited to long-form discussions, because it’s generally limited to a few hours, and due to the lack of read/unread status. You can’t rely on participants to follow a thread for days/weeks/months/years as you can on web forums and mailing lists.

[Zababa]

I agree that HN is not the best for long-form discussions. However, I'd say that content on HN is not as short-lived as a tweet thanks to the features I talked about. I think that's part of why it feels specials compared to Twitter/Facebook for example.