Ask YC: Is there currently a good way to have very long-lived debates on the web?

Do you see any benefit in having a service specifically for this purpose?

I was thinking of something where for a given debate topic, you would "subscribe" to people whose comments you would like to see more of.

It's kind of like having a huge debate involving many bloggers.

But in this service anyone can subscribe to anyone and you are encouraged to forward comments to your fans. Each comment has a history showing you all the people that it passed through to get to you.

The service could show you in real-time a visualization of the active parts of the debate network and also a summary of what is currently being discussed and by whom.

One could also provide a search across all comments, where the ranking takes into account the fan count of the comment's author at the time the comment was made say.