There are three parents to this idea.

First, @Onions talked about blogging on SN.

Second, a post about a Wordpress plugin to use Lightning for comments to reduce spam.

Third, my own weird process, where when I find a cool thing that has a Hacker News discussion, I save it in my notes with a link to the HN comments, not the thing itself.

I do this because what's most valuable to me is good discussion about stuff I care about. But good discussion is murderously hard to find on the web. For topics the HN audience discusses, it's super high SNR. But most of what I care about isn't discussed there. Or, as with btc, the discussion is super stupid, for various reasons.

The larger point, though, is that an effective discussion layer for things on the internet would be awesome. It's been tried before, and it's usually terrible, bc the business model doesn't work. (See e.g., Disqus.)

So the idea: could SN be this layer?

Right now, SN is its own place. Soon, it will have subs, and it will be its own places. That will be awesome! But what if it could be a comment layer for anything and everything? The most boring version is a Disqus-like plugin, which is maybe what the LN/WP plugin, above, was trying to do. That would be pretty good. But the most exciting version is like a browswer extension or something, where any site could potentially be the source of a SN discussion; and the discussion would always be there. It would be a permanent artifact, an annotation of the thing that went along with the thing.

I can see a bunch of nice benefits:

I don't understand enough about the nuances of being a LN node, channel management, and all that, to know whether this is technically viable from that point of view. But I think it works from the big picture perspective.

Thoughts?