> Point taken, but even in the context of Hacker News, if your write-up exists as blog post with its own URL it can be submitted for discussion in a thread

> Point taken, but even in the context of Hacker News, if your write-up exists as blog post with its own URL it can be submitted for discussion in a thread of its own, linking to the blog post. That's a bit like being in the thrall of an intense and interesting conversation and saying "sorry I have to go mail you the documents". It breaks the flow and defeats the purpose of a technology that was designed to overcome exactly that pitfall. > From the point of view of a Hacker News reader, it's easier if you copy+paste relevant text from your blog post directly into your comment. True. And I do that often enough as well. In addition I want to give the reader a genuinely interesting link (which itself contains further well researched links to explore the topic. Again, that's what we built this technology for. > The taboo against 'promoting' is also there for a reason. Sometimes people really are motivated by bumping the hit-count on their page, rather than by contribution to the discussion. Understood. And sometimes people aren't motivated to by hits. Crucially there's no mechanism for distinguishing the two and so conversation is stifled out of fear. > Things are certainly worse on the major 'silo' websites that are engineered to t to prevent people navigating away from their domain or equivalent mobile app. They certainly are, but do we want to emulate that and let HN become the same?