Ask HN: Where have the comments gone?

I wanted to send this [1] discussion to a friend but saw that it has only 3 comments. I know that it had many before. Also, HN Search [2] says it has 229 comments. How can this happen?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8693932

[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?q=comments+gone#!/story/forever/0/Google%20can%20now%20tell%20you%20are%20not%20a%20robot%20with%20just%20one%20click!

r721 11y

They were probably transferred to this discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8693767

dang 11y

You're right. We nearly always add a comment saying "Comments moved to X" in the duplicate thread, but neglected to this time. Sorry for the confusion.

The current way of merging threads is low-tech. We like to do things manually for a while, to get a sense of how best to automate them later. Eventually, though, merging threads will probably be a fully-baked feature of the site, because many users have asked for it.