What do people think of this - it feels like this is sort of siphoning off legitimate conversation for HN to a somewhat-rival community.

(I'm sure many of us use both Quora and HN, but there is definitely overlap like this)

There's also a number of HN people that wouldn't be able to participate due to not having Facebook or Twitter accounts and thus being unable to have a Quora account.

++. No way in hell I am letting Quora know who all my friends are, without first checking out the site and building trust. OpenID (like stackoverflow) or GTFO.

Quora - no external hyperlinks - HN wins.

Hacker News is bad at a persistent conversation of this type though, it will drop off the front page in a day and no one will add to it further. Something like this benefits from longer conversation though as it is a day to day and ever changing discussion.

So we'll do it again next year. It works for every other topic.

If the problem with a point-in-time conversation of this kind is that it goes stale, the problem with wiki-style "persistent conversations" is that they also go stale, only piecemeal, like Swiss cheese. You visit the wiki and have no idea which bits are new, and which are old, and whether or not two things that happen to be next to each other were written in the same year or with any reference to each other.

If the wiki were periodically edited, in toto, by someone who cared, this problem could be avoided. But most are not.

People are happy to have the same conversations again, only different. Conversing on HN is not drudgery to be automated away. We like rituals. We like the classics. And new people like going through the classic exercises that their predecessors did.