In my opinion it depends. Here we are talking about really the same idea, and shariff is something I already used. It also is a few steps further, it has a backend to get vote counters and plugins for several frameworks, like Serendipity, Drupal and Wordpress (now, that is something which might have stolen the spotlight, and I opted to not mention that here).

But no, to your question, I don't think it is a new phenomenon or unwanted to mention related projects in comments. That's why I did not even consider that it might hurt op, thanks for chiming in. But yes, shariff should probably have its own thread, the ones I found are old and did get no attention. I'll re-submit it.

I submitted it to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12216263