| 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. |