That's pretty much the result. Any comment made in a journal would add a new article to its group, and then when your newsreader checks for new news it'll see that the group's highest article number is higher than before and tell you there are N new articles.
Or, put another way, the way Usenet works is that you see every article posted to a group; threading is actually kind of pastede on yay, in that it exists because each post has a References: header line listing its immediate ancestors and the newsreader reconstructs the followup tree from that.
(The LJ code is probably not unlike that internally — I know that comments use a serial number that's global over the entire journal they're in, not just the post — but it's all laden down with secret 8-bit talkid tags and boxed off behind restrictive web stuff which THOU SHALT NOT SCREEN-SCRAPE AT THE PERIL OF THY IMMORTAL SOUL or however that went, so it's got a very different set of expectations, as you point out.)
Personally… while I certainly understand that there are cases where taking information that was already visible in some form and aggregating it can cross the line into creepiness, I don't know that comments on the old posts of journals you subscribe to should be that big a thing. Others may disagree, and probably will, but then there are people who object in similar terms to the DW importer, or to syndicated feeds.
I guess one way to think about it is in terms of what actions you'd have to take to get a similar effect. Here, it's like going back arbitrarily far on your reading page (and magically skipping the old stuff). It's not like people don't sometimes go back a bit into posts they've already seen checking for new comments (cf. the ?nc= thing); this is kind of an extension of that. By contrast, for the (apparently actually once proposed for LJ?) hypothetical feature of subscribing to every visible-to-you comment a person makes anywhere, even on a journal you have no connection to, that's more like going into a person's profile and looking through everything they're subscribed to and then going through every post in all of those — or, I guess, subcribing to all of them yourself and making a custom group for them, which you read for the sole purpose of picking out that one person's comments. In neither case is this not highly creepy. I'm not sure this is the most robust way to think about this, because it's defined in terms of existing features, but maybe it's something.
Also OMG long comment. I should probably make a post out of some of this.
no subject
Or, put another way, the way Usenet works is that you see every article posted to a group; threading is actually kind of pastede on yay, in that it exists because each post has a References: header line listing its immediate ancestors and the newsreader reconstructs the followup tree from that.
(The LJ code is probably not unlike that internally — I know that comments use a serial number that's global over the entire journal they're in, not just the post — but it's all laden down with secret 8-bit talkid tags and boxed off behind restrictive web stuff which THOU SHALT NOT SCREEN-SCRAPE AT THE PERIL OF THY IMMORTAL SOUL or however that went, so it's got a very different set of expectations, as you point out.)
Personally… while I certainly understand that there are cases where taking information that was already visible in some form and aggregating it can cross the line into creepiness, I don't know that comments on the old posts of journals you subscribe to should be that big a thing. Others may disagree, and probably will, but then there are people who object in similar terms to the DW importer, or to syndicated feeds.
I guess one way to think about it is in terms of what actions you'd have to take to get a similar effect. Here, it's like going back arbitrarily far on your reading page (and magically skipping the old stuff). It's not like people don't sometimes go back a bit into posts they've already seen checking for new comments (cf. the ?nc= thing); this is kind of an extension of that. By contrast, for the (apparently actually once proposed for LJ?) hypothetical feature of subscribing to every visible-to-you comment a person makes anywhere, even on a journal you have no connection to, that's more like going into a person's profile and looking through everything they're subscribed to and then going through every post in all of those — or, I guess, subcribing to all of them yourself and making a custom group for them, which you read for the sole purpose of picking out that one person's comments. In neither case is this not highly creepy. I'm not sure this is the most robust way to think about this, because it's defined in terms of existing features, but maybe it's something.
Also OMG long comment. I should probably make a post out of some of this.