Maybe, but HN suffers quite as a bit as a forum. It's not really productive to go back and edit a comment to improve its quality. The half-life of even a popula

Maybe, but HN suffers quite as a bit as a forum. It's not really productive to go back and edit a comment to improve its quality. The half-life of even a popular thread on the front page is only a few hours, with a very long tail, so you might spend ten minutes editing a comment you made an hour ago all so that only three people will ever read it. For better or worse, downvote-to-sort-by-quality is a lot more efficient, and a lot less noisy. Read this as less of a disagreement with you and more of a criticism of HN as a place for high-quality discussions.