How about we start to explicitly annotate articles which are ranked High on HN to strengthen the community?
When annotation meets comments in the public sphere, (like on hypothes.is or genius.com), there is a potential, theoretically, to makes discussions more focused. But there are practical problems:
- Most comment threads work best in short/intense life cycles. As the Ask HN today about Longer Discussions [1] shows, it is difficult to make them last for a few days, let alone make replies stick forever to their sources.
- A lot of comments are either only tangentially related to the article or just a general reaction to it. It is an open kind of dialogue. Even if one message uses quotes, its replies will often drift away.
I wouldn't generally be interested in articles annotated by someone else. Those annotations are largely personal, based on that particular reader's viewpoint and interests. It doesn't feel like a random person's annotations on an article really add any depth to me. It might be different it was a social annotation system where people could reply, but we already do basically that by quoting the article.
The exception to that would be articles annotated by an expert in that field. I would be interested in seeing Fauci's annotations on COVID articles, or a tournament-winning MTG player's annotations on new cards or something like that. At that point it's more about reading into their thought process than it is about the literal annotations, though.