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Comment by dkokelley | Hacker News Reader

http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=you+weren%2...

How is it that this article is getting reposted? It's a great article, I know. But couldn't the HN community submit and upvote new and current articles? Wouldn't the community be better served by this? I suppose if enough members haven't seen it then the upvotes and front page placement are a net gain, but please don't let this stuff rise to the top just because pg wrote it. If it must stay up here, let it be because users who have not read the article prior find value in it.

/self-righteous rant

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The weird thing is how selective HN is about duplicate articles. I've submitted things just to find out they were originally posted up to 3 years ago after it redirects me to the submission. A PG essay can be resubmitted, same URL and title, without issue at least several times (as the HN search link shows).

I'd love to know how HN goes about deciding which content is OK to resubmit over and over again.

It keeps track of the sites in memory. That means if the machine gets kicked, old urls can be submitted again.

It is also just simple URL based limitations, adding some bogus parameters to a url, or a hash, would be enough to get around it.

I don't know the specifics of the algo, but it may also add sites to its cache if someone visits one of the old comments pages, which could make it look more sporadic and picky.

You can see I've posted at least one pg article I found insightful but wasn't voted up, so anecdotal evidence suggests people don't vote it simply because it is written by pg.

And towards your second point, as someone who has been on this site for little over six months, this is the first time I came across this article and found it interesting, insightful, and gave me lots of things to think about. I presume there were enough other people who also thought so.

Your article was also an old one (from 7 years ago in this case). You were also not the first to post that article (preempted by 4 years). I mention the author because there's usually a rush to be the first to post new his new essays and they get upvoted highly and quickly (although I believe they are well-deserved votes). Typically reposted articles get translated into upvotes for the original article submission, but this is not always the case (although I believe it is the intended behavior).

As a general rule, if it's from pg, it's either new or it's been posted before. This opens up an entirely new debate over whether reposts are good for an online community or not. Generally, I'm for them, provided they are voted up because of their value to the current user audience, and not any sort of fanaticism.

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