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Comment by pg | Hacker News Reader

The threads page (http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=eru) is a kind of de facto microblog.

I wouldn't recommend using toplevel submissions as blog entries, because it would amount to self-submitting every post to news.yc. But if people wanted to use news.yc as a blog platform, I'd be open to it. It would only take about 10 lines of code. Does anyone?

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Can you please allow us to see more entries in the 'threads' page? (perhaps with a 'more' link)

Yup HN Blog Platform would be cool.

This is the feature I want most of anything. Why can't the threads page go on forever, paginated?

My guess is that this was done to prevent trolls from going through someone's entire comment history and downmodding everything. (Not that this is impossible to do currently, but it's tougher than it would be if a user's comments were paginated out to infinity).

Or it could just be a feature that was left out for lack of time/motivation.

I assume the latter. After a week or so (I think), the downmod button disappears from all comments.

It also has the beneficial effect of ending stupid debates. Joel's BoS forum had other limitations (like lack of quoting and threading) that they kept because it improved the level of discourse.

actually, it is impossible to do currently. after a comment reaches a certain age, one or two days i think, you can't downvote it anymore.

I enthusiastically agree. I don't have time to keep a blog. If I did, I'd feel obligated to add to it and that's the last thing I need. The great thing about HN is that I just comment spontaneously when I'm moved to do so, and on several occasions this has led me to express thoughts that have been kicking around in my head for a long time, but which I never wrote down before. It would be nice to have access to the history of this.

It would be even more useful to have the full history of other users' comments too. One of my favorite things to do on this site is run across an intelligent remark and then look back to see what else that person has had to say.

Try http://www.ycombinator.search.xirium.com/cgi-bin/search.cgi?...

Thanks!

Can you do type=comment or something like that?

SearchYC.com provides a feed of each user's comments: http://searchyc.com/user/kirubakaran?only=comments&sort=...

http://www.ycombinator.search.xirium.com/cgi-bin/search.cgi?...

I also added tags, which may become increasingly useful if blogging is implemented:

http://www.ycombinator.search.xirium.com/cgi-bin/search.cgi?...

Tags: [search] [blogging] [tagging] [meta]

Cool

I would use this. It'd be cool if the blog posts are voteable so that the really interesting ones can bubble up to the front page as actual news.yc entries.

I'd be interested.

I kind of envision something like the threads page, but viewable by anyone who clicks on my profile. Additionally, I could post self-contained entries not spawned from comments.

Still 10 lines of code? ;)

I think it would be worthwhile as long as the things people submit still meet the existing site guidelines: no cat pictures, nothing about "I had dinner with so and so last night".

I started to respond, "...then they could be aggregated in a separate top level 'blogs' tabs and upvoted if interesting."

...but then something groovier occurred to me. What would be all kinds of cool would be an aggregation that automatically sucked in an RSS feed listed in a user's profile for all users with, say, over 100 karma. That'd be similar in spirit to the Planet Startup idea from a while back, which sadly didn't get a critical mass of feeds.

OK, so If I really wanted to do this I would post each entry as a comment to e.g. this submission.

Technically it would not be a very clever idea to turn news.yc into a blogging platform. If there is a benefit it would be social at most. (As the whole affair of 'startup news' instead of reddit was.)

Does anyone?

Yes

Hmmm... if you do implement this, I suppose it would be pretty easy to integrate with e.g. tumblr.

Yes.

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