Many people seem to mistake the social purpose of these “post a link and comment on it” sites as actually being purely for discussing the content of the link. It’s possible to use such sites this way, but it’s not incentivized by the UX compared to the alternative discussed above. You usually need stringent community moderation if you want people to focus on the news itself.
A free UX design idea: if you want to build “a discussion forum for news topics in a domain”, then rather than endlessly cloning the Reddit/HN model, try building a hybrid of Reddit with a traditional discussion forum. I.e.,
1. start with a traditional discussion forum (thread-list view with threads sorted by last-posted time);
2. make it so threads aren't “bumped” to the top from regular posts in those threads;
3. add a special “news link” type of post, that users can make, which does bump the thread.
(Bonus ideas: scrape the news-links and so render the news-link's content inline in the thread. Have automatic "threadmark" navigation between the spans of posts delimited by these news-item posts. Make clicking the thread in the thread-list view navigate to the newest news-item post. Require moderators to approve news-items before the bump triggers, to avoid "redundant" bumps, to in turn increase users' faith in bumps translating to a real renewal of discussion.)
I imagine such a UX would work much better as a way to explicitly run continuous long-running discussions of news topics, as refueled by news links. One core benefit is that what would on Reddit be “previous threads” would on this forum be “the same thread”, and so people would (hopefully!) feel much less of a reason to recapitulate the exact same posts.
There is a value in rehashing previous conversations. Imagine if you were at a cafe, having an intellectual conversation with your friend while a GPT-12 butler listened. Every time you rehash a conversation that someone else had, GPT-12 butler interrupts and says "excuuuuse me sir, some permutation of this conversation has happened 2000 times on the internet. I will replay the top 3 of those. Please listen carefully, then proceed to tread new ground." I think that GPT-12 butler would be very annoying.
You might think that I'm making a strawman argument, because I'm certain you wouldn't like the interrupting GPT-12 butler either. However, the UX you proposed would sometimes feel just as constraining.
Participating in arguments, even if they aren't novel, is a cognitively enriching experience. Reading but not participating in those very same arguments, while enriching in its own way, is not a complete replacement. Furthermore, I feel that in order to argue at higher levels of abstraction (which new fields are biased towards), you should first participate in discourse at every preceding level of abstraction. Reddit and HN allow for that. They're not perfect, but I don't think that enforced meta-threads would be an improvement.
All that being said, I think that your "bonus" idea of hyperlinking discussion to relevant excerpts in the article, inline, can be singularly transformative.
Many people seem to mistake the social purpose of these “post a link and comment on it” sites as actually being purely for discussing the content of the link. It’s possible to use such sites this way, but it’s not incentivized by the UX compared to the alternative discussed above. You usually need stringent community moderation if you want people to focus on the news itself.
A free UX design idea: if you want to build “a discussion forum for news topics in a domain”, then rather than endlessly cloning the Reddit/HN model, try building a hybrid of Reddit with a traditional discussion forum. I.e.,
1. start with a traditional discussion forum (thread-list view with threads sorted by last-posted time);
2. make it so threads aren't “bumped” to the top from regular posts in those threads;
3. add a special “news link” type of post, that users can make, which does bump the thread.
(Bonus ideas: scrape the news-links and so render the news-link's content inline in the thread. Have automatic "threadmark" navigation between the spans of posts delimited by these news-item posts. Make clicking the thread in the thread-list view navigate to the newest news-item post. Require moderators to approve news-items before the bump triggers, to avoid "redundant" bumps, to in turn increase users' faith in bumps translating to a real renewal of discussion.)
I imagine such a UX would work much better as a way to explicitly run continuous long-running discussions of news topics, as refueled by news links. One core benefit is that what would on Reddit be “previous threads” would on this forum be “the same thread”, and so people would (hopefully!) feel much less of a reason to recapitulate the exact same posts.