> help the author avoid writing up the same ideas again.
Oh, how I wish!
Except that many sites and services are hostile to this because it
encroaches on their "attention territory".
If as an author you link to an idea you already carefully expressed
elsewhere as a blog post or book, the comment gets put down or
censored for "promoting".
More often on HN now, to avoid punishment, I just copy/paste my
original writing rather than give the reader a link to explore more
deeply.
There's clearly a gap between what we preach as good "academic" ways
of spreading information and ideas, and the reality/practice in
systems that control expression.
Point taken, but even in the context of Hacker News, if your write-up exists as a blog post with its own URL it can be submitted for discussion in a thread of its own, linking to the blog post.
From the point of view of a Hacker News reader, it's easier if you copy+paste the relevant text from your blog post directly into your comment. None of us are in the habit of following every link. Even if you do have to copy+paste in this way, at least the text you're copying from has a permanent home.
The taboo against 'promoting' is also there for a reason. Sometimes people really are motivated by bumping the hit-count on their page, rather than by contributing to the discussion.
Things are certainly worse on the major 'silo' websites that are engineered to try to prevent people navigating away from their domain or equivalent mobile app.
> Point taken, but even in the context of Hacker News, if your
write-up exists as blog post with its own URL it can be submitted
for discussion in a thread of its own, linking to the blog post.
That's a bit like being in the thrall of an intense and interesting
conversation and saying "sorry I have to go mail you the
documents". It breaks the flow and defeats the purpose of a technology
that was designed to overcome exactly that pitfall.
> From the point of view of a Hacker News reader, it's easier if you
copy+paste relevant text from your blog post directly into your
comment.
True. And I do that often enough as well. In addition I want to give
the reader a genuinely interesting link (which itself contains further
well researched links to explore the topic. Again, that's what we
built this technology for.
> The taboo against 'promoting' is also there for a reason. Sometimes
people really are motivated by bumping the hit-count on their page,
rather than by contribution to the discussion.
Understood. And sometimes people aren't motivated to by
hits. Crucially there's no mechanism for distinguishing the two and so
conversation is stifled out of fear.
> Things are certainly worse on the major 'silo' websites that are
engineered to t to prevent people navigating away from their domain
or equivalent mobile app.
They certainly are, but do we want to emulate that and let HN become
the same?
Oh, how I wish!
Except that many sites and services are hostile to this because it encroaches on their "attention territory".
If as an author you link to an idea you already carefully expressed elsewhere as a blog post or book, the comment gets put down or censored for "promoting".
More often on HN now, to avoid punishment, I just copy/paste my original writing rather than give the reader a link to explore more deeply.
There's clearly a gap between what we preach as good "academic" ways of spreading information and ideas, and the reality/practice in systems that control expression.