SearchYC.com

Could our profile include the total numbers of comments and submissions we've ever posted?

Is there a feed for comments?

I was browsing http://news.ycombinator.org/threads?id=nickb and his comments/submissions are available for only 41 days whereas my own limited postings are available in whole. Can someone explain if there is a cap or other system in place for users with massive karma?

The cap seems to be at 180 submits (I've checked maybe 4 users with 2000+ karma) and variable comments.

As the site grows, you lose signal:noise ratio.

So, perhaps setting a maximum number of comments per day would help keep comment quality high.

Perhaps 2/day max for a new user, and a limit of 5/day total regardless of age or karma? You would give up some good points, including the occasional good back and forth. But it'd cut off arguments and I think people would be hesitant to write a silly quip, "good post" noise, or argue/flame if they know they're using up their limited breath by doing it.

Personally, I'm for quantity over quality - I'd rather learn five interesting points across fifteen good comments than ten interesting points across 70 comments, less than half of which are good. There'd have to be some testing on the numbers, but experimenting with some kind of comment limits might help hold back the tides of mediocrity.

I'm browsing my comments history and just see my comments from 20 days ago.

What happened to my previous comments?

Some of the comments on HN have been degrading slightly over my time on HN. I was wondering if there was a general method of how to create good an insightful comments on HN.

And the comments are disabled for my previous submission? wtf?

Why can't I comment on this job posting?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=110664

So I have this problem:

I write a lot of comments on the web. But its hard to keep track if someone has replied back to my comments.

So maybe you hackers can come up with a solution?:

Maybe make a firefox toolbar that tracks all of this and alerts you in real-time whenever someone replies back to my comments.

If you post a comment on a recent thread, and there's only a couple other comments on about 1-4 points, then if you want your comment to be on top and get the most discussion and feedback (and maybe karma too), you have an incentive to downvote the competition to raise the relative score of your comment.

That is a bad incentive to have. Anyone have a good idea to fix it?