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by merricksb 3106 days ago
Heavily discussed at time of publication 7 months ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14340286

1 comments

I see a lot of articles that are dupes, but nobody ever says anything. Just curious - Are we all allowed to talk about something twice or not? Looks like plenty of people commented on this posting of the story, so I'm left wondering - what's the intention of this comment?

I don't see anything in the guidelines about duplicates here - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Are moderators responsible for pointing this out or just regular users? Who eventually marks something as a dupe? Is it in response to a comment like this?

Is this actually the most highly rated comment or did mods put it there?

(Again - just curious!)

The site policy about reposts/dupes is explained in the FAQs:

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

If a story has had significant attention in the last year or so, we kill reposts as duplicates. If not, a small number of reposts is ok.

And you can see more commentary on it from dang via this search:

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=dang%20significant%20attention...

Any user can point out that a link is a dupe or has been posted before. It's helpful for others to be able to see earlier discussions (whether or not it was in the past 12 months and qualifies as a dupe), and evidently moderators don't always realise something is a repost until a user points it out.

There are no hard and fast rules about what user can or should comment about stuff like this, but the mods seem to appreciate it any time people are helpful.

And when a post is marked as dupe, the mods will push the explanatory comment (either from them or another user who already pointed it out) to the top of the thread.

I always figured such comments were primarily made to allow additional reading, for those interested.