Why not? "Apple backs X standard" sounds like enough for an HN story to me Every story sounds interesting to someone. Again, the burden of adding interestingne

Why not? "Apple backs X standard" sounds like enough for an HN story to me Every story sounds interesting to someone. Again, the burden of adding interestingness is on the author/poster. Could this supposed Apple support for some obscure standard most people haven't heard of be interesting? Sure. Is it interesting to merely state? No. Seems pretty straightforward. You didn't reply to my question of "what if you could only link a domain" I don't understand the question, I guess. The granularity of URLs happens to fit the granularity of HN stories. These things are connected and sometimes the granularity does get broken and the results are often iffy - e.g. posts of individual tweets, posts of random github issues, etc. Such posts are sometimes good but often bad because they don't actually form interesting stories that produce curious conversation. 'What if you could only link domains' just feels like a different version of 'what if HN was just twitter'. And, incidentally, HN does have conventions against certain types of 'domain' linking - if you link a domain that's a collection of things, it will get modded down and you'll be told to pick something from the collection and post that instead of the whole thing. I'm not playing logic games. I am! That's what voting is for. No, voting is just a part of that. There's a lot of convention/culture and there is very much a convention against letting people shape the conversation with their own gloss on other people's stuff. That's what commenting is for and what titling is not for. Finding an interesting thing inside an uninteresting thing that deserves its own title happens constantly. Well, you'll have to find some examples because the ones that come up are almost always of not-interesting things or interestingness special-pleadings. In the former case they are completely objectively not making a "most important comment". Of course they are, especially when they are selecting a non-representative part of the article which is quite a lot of the time - in fact, by the process you are describing, by definition. You don't get to tell other users what is important in an article that isn't yours from the privileged position of a title. You don't get to mega-comment, basically. This isn't some law of physics or the only way to run a messageboard but it's hardly some unreasonable mystery of HN. Lots of subreddits and other forums operate similarly, for similar reasons. And sometimes people submit tweets to HN. HN is supposed to be for anything interesting, no matter the length. Well, not so sure about no matter the length and people do submit tweets to HN and sometimes it works but sometimes it doesn't, I touched on this above. They're the wrong granularity, there are titling problems, dupeyness problems (there are infinite tweets about the same thing), etc. Tweets do kind of break the classic 'link aggregator' design assumptions. That's not the fault of tweets or the tweeters or the posters of tweets to HN but it's definitely a thing. "Here is a thing I found, here is what it is in a few words, nothing further. Link the thing, add your comment.