Thanks; I just re-read that and it seems to me that HN is mostly pretty well aligned with what he's saying. But let me phrase that as a question: what's the most important insight in the essay that HN does not currently line up well with?

As a long time lurker, but a brand new user, I think my one criticism, as it relates to the article, would be that HN doesn't facilitate conversations as well as I would like. Or I'm using the site wrong.

So far as I can tell, there is no way for me to know when a person has responded to a comment of mine other than keeping my account page opening and refreshing to see if anyone has posted a response to me. Some means of being told, hey, someone posted a response to your comment 'X' would be nice.

That and there's a dearth of sex talk. Get us more of that you delicious beast.

> So far as I can tell, there is no way for me to know when a person has responded to a comment of mine other than keeping my account page opening and refreshing to see if anyone has posted a response to me. Some means of being told, hey, someone posted a response to your comment 'X' would be nice.

It used to be that you could put a token for an YC-backed messaging startup, but I think the startup died since you can no longer do so. In the meantime, bunch of HN notification services were created. I currently use HN Replies[0], which sends me an e-mail every time someone responds to my comment.

I agree this is a very important feature if you want to facilitate actual conversations; otherwhise, it's hard to track discussions that started more than a day ago. I've noticed a significant positive change in the way I interact with HN since I started using third-party e-mail notifications - I'm more likely to participate in a comment thread over several days, and I now consider it good manners to respond to replies that try to engage me in further conversations.

So, tl;dr - 'dang, I strongly second the "comment notifications" idea!

[0] - http://www.hnreplies.com/

Thanks for the tip off on that, it looks like a decent work around for what I'm looking for. Except that I hate getting a lot of email, but I'll have to live with it.

One of the things I get frustrated by with online conversations is how frequently they just sort of die without making much progress. I'm usually not interested in just scoring points with searing rebuttals followed by a mic-drop. I like hashing things out. That these conversations take place on HN so frequently is put in an entirely different context now that I see how poorly the site facilitates it.

As a side note / issue: culturally this site discourages low quality posts (like this one would be if I just said a quick 'thanks for the link' like I intended to), but sometimes manners dictates an acknowledgment even when you have nothing else to add. Some means of doing that beyond an anonymous upvote could be kind of cool.

> As a side note / issue: culturally this site discourages low quality posts (like this one would be if I just said a quick 'thanks for the link' like I intended to), but sometimes manners dictates an acknowledgment even when you have nothing else to add.

I see what you did there ;). I sometimes too spend a while figuring out something constructive to write when the only real thing I actually wanted to say is "thanks!". I agree it would be good to facilitate this use case better, but I have no idea how to approach it. For now, if I can't for life find anything else of value I could add to my reply, I'll just write "Thanks for the [link/explanation/whatever]!" and hope it won't be treated as comment spam.

(As an aside, I tend to upvote honest "thank you" comments whenever I see them. As a way of encouraging civility, I think one should not only reward the good comments, but also expressions of gratitude.)

Lots of people have asked for that and I think we'll probably break down and add it relatively soon. Also, welcome!

Probably can't help with that other thing.