story
So, yes, you can return to those pages at a later point in time.
Again, in what way can you use this site as your bookmarks? You save an obscure documentation page and a mod deletes it, and then what?
HN (like digg, reddit, etc) is social news, or something. People who confuse the two think so because the delicious front page and digg looked similar, or whatever.
The bigger risk for deletions seems to be not tech related stuff but rather non-tech related stuff that manages to get a couple of upvotes.
HN is social news simply because the audience can define it as such.
The main ingredients, the ability to post links and to discuss them and to revisit them at a later stage makes it such that some users will come by and use it in that way.
All the stuff you submit and upvote goes on that list, you can't remove stuff from the list if you've upvoted it, you can't remove stuff from the list after a certain time has passed.
Like I said, it's a forum.
As the coiner of the term, you may want to update the wikipedia article which, after listing the basic requirements says: "As these services have matured and grown more popular, they have added extra features such as ratings and comments on bookmarks".
So there seems to be a convergence of terms and services here.
I think the major difference between social bookmarking sites (of which I see HN as one, and you obviously don't) versus a forum is that on a forum the vast majority of the topics is not started with a link.
On HN the vast majority of the topics is started with a link.
