In my mind, HN is intentionally built to be minimally social. It is also what makes this site consistently have higher quality content. This may be of some deba

In my mind, HN is intentionally built to be minimally social. It is also what makes this site consistently have higher quality content. This may be of some debate but I feel HN is slanted toward doers. HN is almost featureless but one of those features is "noprocrast" - a function that actually promotes NOT coming to the website. If pg wanted to slant toward information consumers he'd add rss and retweeting and auto post-to-my-thousand-social-media-services features. So it is in this way that any type of social media extravaganza would actually be counterproductive. HN is wonderful the way it is imo and the fact that it actually takes effort to find things or get into to touch with other members is the reason why it is wonderful. Take your example. If you felt the need to add your opinion the the conversation or felt that a comment was so incredibly beneficial, take some effort to reach out to that individual via an email or his company blog, etc.