> Your change will basically mean that someone like me who might have something to add to an existing conversation might as well not bother.

That is already the case. Very few people read or participate in threads more than 24 hours old. You're already walking into an empty room and having a conversation with yourself; all this change does is lock the door.

Is that really the case? I find quite a few users seem to check replies to their comments -- so eg: answering a question usually isn't a waste of time. It would be if the person asking a question doesn't have 1k karma (see other comments for riff on this topic). Just struck me that this is rather bad -- while hn isn't (probably nor should be) a "stack exchange" type site, there's always someone asking on a story "what is this X that everyone here seem to know". Where X is anything for traditional MVC to data normalization etc[1]. I'm sure we all have some gaping holes in our knowledge of computer science and history -- having such questions answered seems to me to be a good way to maintain a sense of community.

[1] For example, not realizing that RC4 is now hopelessly broken, and asking for a couple of recent references.

If that were the case then wouldn't a more appropriate solution be to lock commenting altogether after a particular time since thread creation (or an expiry after falling off of the front page?).

> Very few people read or participate in threads more than 24 hours old.

I don't reread the thread, but I will pay attention to someone replying to my comments even after several days.

as bsder said above me, "I don't reread the thread, but I will pay attention to someone replying to my comments even after several days."

Also, (not unlike this comment) I'll find myself late to the party and add comments to posts because I believe my thoughts might be relevant.

I actually treat HN comments to be a ledger of sorts. Like other industry forums around the net, it is a collection of some very strong minds on tech-related subjects, and a decent resource to check for opinion or tangential information on all sorts of topics. If there is a discussion on something that I have unique insight to, I will post on long dead threads just to know it was posted.

I'm probably an outlier, and this use case is probably not all that prevalent, but pending comments being purged without endorsements would make this forum unarguably more temporal, for better or worse.

No you're not an outlier. This will change the face of HN, and I'm not really sure what for.

(well I have an inkling and it's spelled pretty clearly in the OP but I fear it may be considered "gratuitous nastiness", to speak my heart)

I wasn't aware that there was a page 10.

In my experience, page 2 is inaccessible after carefully scanning page 1 for a minute or two, and maybe clicking on or two links and reading the articles. Some generated link to page 2 expires during the time I'm scanning page 1.

Five years, I thought that was by intent and not some bug. Equally frustrating, but damn.

TLDR: Yes, Virginia, there is a Page 10 of HN. You'll just have to take someone else's word on that.

This is my core concern also. pg says that hopefully traffic will be high enough that you won't even see a delay - that's logic that only holds true for the front page. Further down, comments won't come through for large amounts of time. That's going to ruin discussion and also create pileups where 10 people see that some link should obviously be posted and do so before anyone gets approved.