Perhaps less glamorous but one of my favorite HN moments is a recent link to the wikipedia article on Grandma Gatewood [1] where someone asks “Any of her descendants here on HN? She had 11 and it's been more than half a century now…”. Minutes later…
> Hi! I’m her great-great granddaughter. I actually met the thru-hiker mentioned in the comment above, Dixie, in October 21 and we still keep in touch!
That's a list we keep of particularly good or cool comments - we used to publish them periodically* but it was too much work. In the meantime anyone who wants to can see the list: https://news.ycombinator.com/highlights. It's just a handful of drops from the ocean and there are tons more out there, so if anyone finds a post that belongs on it, please let me know at [email protected]. I figure this'll be useful for something someday!
* https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Thank you for all you do, dang.
However, our gating factor is time and attention - we only have a fixed amount. I suspect that what makes many HN discussion valuable is that the few top discussions draw most of the focus of a large part of the community at the same time. Without that concentration of focus, you don't get those spontaneous interactions where someone makes a comment about a decision made in a 30 year old piece of software powering half the Internet, and the guy that wrote said software responds with the rational for why he made that decision at the time.
Long lived threads and resurrected discussions from the past diffuse that time and attention. While I like the idea of longer term discussions (a lot!), spreading the beam of focus gets us less 'power on target' for the topics of the day.