I think when we use the word "embed", we should really "embed". In other words, for a given comment of id ID, it'd be better to get the table row of class 'athing' and id ID.

An important reason to embed is for visual authenticity. A Tweet is embedded with the styling that goes with it because it's recognizable. Similarly, I can see an HN comment with the styling and instantly know it's from HN.

Besides visual authenticity, another reason to embed is for functionality. You can interact with an embedded tweet. For an HN comment, this assumes the reader to have an HN account, which is not as likely as a user having a twitter account, but considering the audience this might be wrong. This is not the problem, though.. The problem is that an HN comment is not a Tweet. It is not a sound-bite and voting on a comment that was taken out of context (which can be a long thread) is simply stupid, or something only a stupid person would do.

The optimist would say: "someone with a Hacker News account isn't stupid enough to do that; they won't use the embedded comment for that". This makes embedding for functionality useless.

The pessimist would say: only stupid people would do that and there are really stupid people who actually would do that, so why include a functionality that only stupid people would use? This also makes embedding for functionality useless.

So I guess we're left with embedding for visual authenticity only. Or taking a screen shot of the element.

By embed I meant to embed the content; I've heard from quite a few people that they love that they can personalize it with simple CSS. I am not sure if this is a problem from me not being native (I'm Spanish) or just a special case/extreme use of the word embed. In both cases, embedding the functionality is not a possible due to common, sane web attack concerns; if I could allow you to change it then I could change it myself which would mean big trouble. What twitter does is keeping the control+developing their own code, an API/library that HN doesn't have available. And of course I'm now going down the road of asking for people's username/password of the different networks.

Also something has to be said about the advantages of thin clients/strong back-ends, which means standardizing the response from https://comments.network/ of the different networks.

Well, then disregard what I said. What I wrote was the opinion from an end-user/page-reader perspective, not from the person who'll handle tweak the styling.

>I am not sure if this is a problem from me not being native (I'm Spanish)

I wouldn't be able to tell, not being native myself (I'm Algerian).

>What twitter does is keeping the control+developing their own code, an API/library that HN doesn't have available. And of course I'm now going down the road of asking for people's username/password of the different networks.

Pardon me, but have you looked at this https://github.com/HackerNews/API http://blog.ycombinator.com/hacker-news-api ? I'm sure you are aware Reddit has an API. Again, I'm sorry for failing to see what's the very particular problem to be solved, not being a developer and all.