You provided a great example of using the conscious choice to seed as a way to signal an upvote. What better way to promote something other than the commitment to redistribute the content? In the context of P2P, it occurred to me that it's also possible to design a fully decentralized comment system using a naming convention. Each comment would be a torrent named after a given scheme, making it possible to track and discover comments related to another torrent. Since seeding means upvoting, then the best comments would be the most seeded ones.
I have a lot of ideas. Each would have to be examined, debunked, improved etc they would have to be considered in combination as many would overlap, contradict or compliment.
On a higher level it's fun to notice that HN isn't suitable for developing anything. People are just talking for talking sake, small nuggets of information are tossed around that may be useful to the reader any place but here. It is quite preposterous actually that this kind of architecture is even a thing. I have higher expectations from scribblings on a napkin among drunks in a loud bar.
When I first got on irc I had the audacity to ask people to do things for me. I even used private messages for this. Everyone got really angry but I disagreed, I still do. irl if I need a drill ill go ring the door 5 houses down the street and expect them to lend it to me. If some stranger asks me to dig a swimming pool for them ill show up with 10 friends and go do it. People who don't normally function that way should be offered assistance until they've so abundantly made use of it that they too will lend a hand. Online the opposite is happening. People have culturally rendered themselves to be quite useless.
Imagine for laughs trying to architect and build a house on Twitter. Even GIT is pretty useless. If it cant get an 8 year old to contribute in 5 minutes a tool has failed. Sure, all parts of a project might be extremely complicated or dangerous but that is just looking for excuses.
Therefore, I would argue, everything that doesn't directly contribute towards setting or accomplishing real world goals should live behind some imaginary line in the sand and be treated like useless content. Educative or inspiring does count as useful but only barely.
Clients can download reasonably large archives reasonably well. You kinda want to avoid having lots of connections per comment. Even the most recent content can be combined into an archive (along with public keys) and passed around between nodes (favoring nodes that forward it faster and/or have the least invalid signatures) If someone puts a large video in their post it can be a separate torrent that automatically survives depending on the posters popularity and the quality of the video. Those who desire it can pretend it is a block chain and hoard everything.
