Here's one [legally crazy] idea: there are some known great commenters here on HN. They write thoughtful comments. I'd think they would be open to having their good comments reposted on another high-quality community. So, could lobste.rs ask a few top HN commenters for the permission to cross-post their comments from HN?
Legally, it would be fine: lobster.rs would get a license, the original poster does own copyright. It's also "clean", if it's done in a manual, selective way. And boom, you get higher quality comments "for free".
There might also be some copyright issues. When you post a comment on HN you're implicitly giving HN permission to display the comment on HN, but not necessarily granting permission to redisplay the comment on other sites of which you might not even be aware.
Godwinized example: most of us wouldn't want our names and comments displayed on, say, a Nazi site, especially if it looked like the comments were being posted directly on that site rather than being copied from somewhere else.
Actually yes, but so most sites has some legalese in the TOS and there is also fair use.
IANAL. TINLA. You can probably quote a comment from one HN user, but if you copy all the comments from one "famous" user of HN and write a book with them, then you'll probably get some copyright problems.
The special thing about HN is that it keeps a quality of comments way above average
That was in fact also a quality of Usenet, before it went out of fashion for unclear reasons.
It would be an interesting exercise to mirror (or even move) HN to a nntp-server. Personally I believe the signal/noise ratio would improve drastically.
It'd only work if you keep the quality of the people commenting the same or better. There's nothing really unique about the way HN works, there's just smarter people here, on average, than in your typical Youtube comment thread.
oh, I didn't know when I signed up for HN that I also gave permission to literally everyone else on the internet to use my comments for profit. I thought the license only applied to HN. Silly me, guess you learn something new everyday.
It would be totally against the spirit of HN, but hypothetically, if you had a Patreon for HN comments, you'd have at least one patron here.
I agree and second 'pcwalton here. I don't always agree with what you write, but I always appreciate seeing it here, you have one of the best insight to comment length ratio.
I don't believe your issue would be with HN. HN is just an aggregator for content published elsewhere, so they have no say in whether or not you also link to that content.
As regards wanting to publish 'interesting threads', by which I assume you mean debates in the comments; again, I wouldn't worry too much re HN themselves. There are no T&C's to be agreed to when you register an account here, so no-one who comments has granted HN exclusive rights to publish, or transferred copyright on anything they write here. Nor has HN asked for, or claimed any such rights.
So, if I hereby also grant you non-exclusive rights to publish my ill-informed drivel elsewhere, then that's a matter between you and me. Nowt to do with HN.
Of course, in theory, this would mean that you'd have to satisfy yourself that anyone else who comments here and whose words of wisdom you want to reproduce is similarly amenable –and there you open a whole different can of worms, as regards whether or not a comment published on the intarwebs, with no copyright claimed or given, is in the public domain, or not.
I would suggest it [at least partially] is, as is borne witness to by the common practice of reproducing other people's tweets, as practised by most news websites.
> ...they would need some volunteers to separate and clean up the good ideas, and discard the nonsense.
I wish this was a feature on HN actually. It'd be nice if some accounts had the ability to "un-dead" a comment, in the same way that some accounts can flag or unflag posts and comments now.
I browse with showdead on and occasionally run across a comment from a submitter where the submitter was hellbanned for a specific incident but the comment itself is worthwhile.
I think hn needs a concept like r/bestof. It's the only way I get to find the really good user content in Reddit. There's no way I'd see most of that stuff otherwise.
In fact the main reason I read hn comments is the hope of finding comment gems posted by an expert in the field, someone with a unique perspective on an issue, or someone with a heretical but plausible idea.
The level of discourse in HN comments is leaps and bounds better than that in Reddit. At the very least, you'd get a much more useful and legible comment thread. And presumably the topics would be more focused on the HN crowd, where as Reddit runs the gamut
Legal or not, is happening yet. I had found some of my HN comments on other websites. They weren't neither anonym not even particularly useful or clever comments. Just copy pasted. It seems that some people just like collecting random data. Maybe to generate profiles.
Legally, it would be fine: lobster.rs would get a license, the original poster does own copyright. It's also "clean", if it's done in a manual, selective way. And boom, you get higher quality comments "for free".
Would that be completely unfair to HN?
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