Ask HN: Where are the comment links?

4 points·harperlee··2 comments

Up until yesterday, I think, there used to be a link next to the name of a comment poster. It was great for referencing a part of a discussion; I personally found it invaluable to save in Evernote only the part of the conversation that interested me. It was great, as normally there are offtopic threads that are gold.

Is this gone, forever? Did I miss a survey? I humbly request it back...

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according to what @dang told me yesterday[1], the timestamp is now the link:

"Edit: Or rather, as of this evening, click on the comment's timestamp to go to its page. We decided to play with dropping "link" and just hyperlinking the timestamp instead."

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9023341

Untothebreach got it right, but just to expand a bit, a user pointed out several months ago that it has long been a standard convention on sites like this to make the timestamp—the part that says "3 hours ago" and so on—into the comment's permalink, and that if we did that, we could drop the extra "link" bit.

Since HN is minimalist at heart, it seemed worth trying. Of course we'd never take that feature away—we just merged it into the timestamp, which wasn't linking to anything.

Now if I could just find the comment by that user in order to thank him or her, that'd be great... but I looked for ages and couldn't. If anyone can dig it up, please let me know.

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