This is one of my own frustrations with HN. The issue isn't quite as bad as on other discussion sites, but generally, conversations ... fade quickly. I'd like to see some kind of mechanism which works against this tendency.

That said, notifications of themselves ... probably aren't that. Though there might be ways to tweak the mechanic to induce this.

Google+ had a Notifications dynamic that seemed to work well in this effect, though it was somewhat specific to how that site was structured:

- Notifications were for specific discussions.

- Disucssions were hosted by a specific user.

- The Notification went out to all (recent-ish) participants in the discussion.

- Discussion hosts could moderate the thread. This was a two-edged sword, but tended to reduce spam and flamebait when used well.

- The Notifications Pane itself wasn't merely a "something happened" nag, but a site element where new comments could be directly responded to.

- Discussion threads were flat, with most-recent comments appearing at the bottom of the thread. I'd at first missed the threaded style, but came to appreciate a flat disucssion which didn't descend into long separated exchanges (frequently flamefests), and for which each subsequent response was an equal contribution to the thread.

- Total thread length was limited to 500 replies.

It's not the same as a topical or open-discussion formum, as with HN. But as a conversation-fostering platform given the right host and participants it could and often did work quite well.

A result was conversations which evolved naturally over days and weeks, sometimes months and years. Conversations didn't simply die.

I agree about the problem of quality conversations fading too quickly.

Perhaps HN could add a /topconversations or /yesterdayconversations link that only highlights the best conversation threads from 24 hours ago. That way attention on good discussions could be maintained for an extra day.

https://news.ycombinator.com/front ?

I meant "conversations" and not posts. Kinda like https://news.ycombinator.com/bestcomments but highlight the ones that have the best overall cluster of comments in a continuous thread

That's useful, and it's often a good way to browse the site --- after a day, assessments on what's significant tend to settle out.

That said, it still won't highlight conversations which have come back to life.

I’ve replied to multiple days old comments and been replied to in turn. I think when you do this you’re not performing for an audience but responding to another person or couple of people individually. The fact not many people are going to see it should be irrelevant - is a piece of art (or a notebook doodle) not worth doing because it has an audience of one?

I didn't phrase it correctly. What I meant was, I want to continue an old comment thread, but then I wonder if its worth doing since the other party probably isn't going to respond or even know that I replied.

I’ve found dropping an upvote and the comment usually triggers a response