In all fairness, it's not entirely obvious that this is how to do it.
But it's a good tip nonetheless. Once you click the "x minutes/hours/days ago" link, besides bookmarking the resulting URL in your browser or elsewhere, you also have a few more options that show up at the top of the comment page. One of them is to "favorite" the comment. You can also favorite a submission in a similar way.
Just be advised that your favorite submissions and comments lists are public.
> it's not entirely obvious that this is how to do it
I totally agree that this is an example of insane, hidden functionality. How could anyone know that "click timestamp" = "view details"? Makes no sense.
However, seemingly every site/app has adopted this, from Twitter to Facebook to several PM services.
OK, so on HN, it's clickable. But "gray text without underline" isn't always clickable on HN. This is true of other sites: it isn't even clear that the timestamp is clickable at all, let alone what'll happen if you do click it.
Why not acknowledge that this is a problem and just add a little "Permalink" link, which some sites used to have? Or at least a permalink icon?
Surely the combined design talent of Google, Facebook, and Twitter can solve this problem better.
I think hidden is not quite the right word. It's a link, likely displayed in a hypertext browser.
A hypertext system that doesn't treat links as slightly opaque, explaining them in detail wherever they appear, sounds unpleasant to me.
I guess you could probably modify most such systems to have a flashing popup on every link that said "There is more information available if you click on the text here!!!!".
You see that "X hours ago" to the right of the username? Yeah, click that...