Right, the democratic component (and inability to do digg-style burying that results) is what makes the news on these kinds of sites better than other options.

Right, the democratic component (and inability to do digg-style burying that results) is what makes the news on these kinds of sites better than other options. The danger, of course, is: how is HN different from reddit.com/r/programming ? How does it stay different? I think it's clear that we would want it to retain a distinctive flavor, but it seems almost inevitable that it would morph into proggit -- unless, perhaps, pg made the user interface purposely difficult. ;) Suggested solutions are sometimes code, sometimes convention. Code: longer time limits on deeply nested conversations. Like this one. Convention: no blog spam wrapping other people's content. (Filters fail here because it's worth a human's time to write just enough almost-relevant 'content' to surround a link, so humans are essential). Different communities can adopt different conventions, and those can shape and inform the voting going forward -- which may be one of the only things that let different democratic news sites retain their distinctive characteristics. So, meh. Heh, it was just an idea. /grumble