Usually HN recycles a few debates for this reason and it pops up a few times over the course of months until everyone finally hashes it out. The breather is good, go to sleep, sleep on it, come back in a few weeks, and we’ll go at it again.

If I got constant alerts about comments, it’s going to devolve into an endless back and forth where no one took a break. Similarly, it also allows people to throw out their perspective against different people versus myopically trying to reconcile differences with just one person.

I’ve been downvoted to hell on a topic one day, and then several weeks later got modest amount of upvotes for the same opinion.