It's how it grows, and whether growth is the priority.
Taking the HN comment community out of the context of the site makes it no different than any other drive-by commenting platform.
This thought process: "HN Comments are great. I want comments on my site. Other comment systems are terrible. I'll put HN comments on my site". Misses the point of why HN comments are great and why these comments-as-a-platform services have all resulted in the same level of awful, despite repeated and varying attempts to solve the problem.
Put a link to HN comments in your footer, bring them here, let the community and the mods help shape the discussion. Don't take the HN conversation out of context and splat it across the web.
If you want federated comments, use one of the existing, awful, toxic commenting systems that inevitably result from that sort of usage.
This has been asked/answered before, but basically it's all about context/relevance. I am adding more networks so you can keep things relevant. Made a blog post about your Raspberry Pi/Node.js server/Elixir? Cool, then HN might be a good fit and you can add the tag `hackernews="31415926535"`. Is it a cooking recipe? Then add that https://www.reddit.com/r/Cooking/ 's link to your post. Actually Reddit is great for this since they have many different topics, but I focused first on improving HN's version since that's the site I use most (it's still an alpha/dev version but wanted some feedback from HN).
Definitely harming the HN community is something that has been mentioned several times which I didn't consider because of what I mentioned above, so I will take that into account when I publish the final version. I don't want to change/harm the community at all, just so other people can read the awesome comments that happen here.
As I stated in my above comment, I believe that encouraging visitors from one site to come directly to a comment (rather than the entire thread) specifically removes the context.
That is a really good point. Even though before clicking the Reply button they can see that comment and its parents, I agree that it would be a better idea to go to that specific comment in the thread instead of to the reply screen that has no context. I thought there was no way of doing it, but each comment has its own id so I'll just link to the `#ID` so even more context is added when clicking on "reply". Thanks for the tip!
Taking the HN comment community out of the context of the site makes it no different than any other drive-by commenting platform.
This thought process: "HN Comments are great. I want comments on my site. Other comment systems are terrible. I'll put HN comments on my site". Misses the point of why HN comments are great and why these comments-as-a-platform services have all resulted in the same level of awful, despite repeated and varying attempts to solve the problem.
Put a link to HN comments in your footer, bring them here, let the community and the mods help shape the discussion. Don't take the HN conversation out of context and splat it across the web.
If you want federated comments, use one of the existing, awful, toxic commenting systems that inevitably result from that sort of usage.