I like the idea.
why comments are not public?
- prevent too much spam, moderation workload
- encourage honest (harsh) feedback that the product owner can take action on.
also if the same feedback comes in twice from 2 diff people, thats a great indicator. public comments do not allow that (since most people wont duplicate a comment if they already see someone else saying it)
1. A downvote system is sufficient to catch spammers, with explicitly moderation needed for edge cases. (And those edge cases would be applicable even in private commenting)
2. Harsh feedback is discouraged on Product Hunt because of the elitism. Having comments public will not discourage it. (C.f. Hacker News)
adding a real commenting system is on the table for sure, ill create a github issue for it and we can discuss with the community about pros/cons
An alternative would be to allow comments to be shown privately or to have a messaging/mail system.
Hiding them by default is a big mistake.
I think this is a solution to a problem that doesn't exist.
If there's one thing I know about "Show HN", it's that the community doesn't hold back on its criticism.