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Comment by detaro | Hacker News Reader

4 points and no comments doesn't count as "dupe" on HN, some reposts are explicitly allowed in such cases.

it does according to Dang. We can't keep making exceptions to the rule like this. Rules are rules.

I've also flagged this submission for being dupe and frankly HN shouldn't be used as a platform to push racially charged politics.

Nothing good is going to come out of it.

Do you have a link to the relevant comment by Dang?

> it does according to Dang.

fairly sure it doesn't, but I'll email just to check.

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

please quote the part talking about dupes there?

That's not the rule—if we were that strict about reposts, a huge number of good submissions would end up getting zero attention because the first time they got posted was a swing and a miss. There's too much randomness in what gets liftoff from /newest for that to work. We want good stories to get multiple cracks at the bat.

This is in the FAQ: "If a story has not had significant attention in the last year or so, a small number of reposts is ok. Otherwise we bury reposts as duplicates." By that rule, the OP is not a dupe. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

The ontopicness question is orthogonal of course. Politics per se is not off topic here—some political overlap is both ok and inevitable: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so.... The main question is whether the post is intellectually interesting or not. I think this one counts. Historical material is generally welcome on HN, and this particular angle hasn't had a lot of discussion.

You're right that we don't want race flamewar, political flamewar, or other flamewar. That means there's an extra burden on commenters to stick to the site guidelines when the topic touches on such flammables. This guideline, for example:

"Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."

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

interesting because I've seen the exact same scenario play out before: someone posts a submission that previously had low amount of upvotes but it was still flagged as a dupe and subsequently forgotten.

so with the precedent, what exactly is your criteria & process for determining whether a submission is dupe or not? It seems rather subjective.

Also with the overwhelming amount of political submissions on HN lately, its leading to a fatigue and polarization of "right" and "wrong" views expressed through downvotes which is essentially censorship from a non-centrist mindset-which ever bias is present at the time of the submission in the absence of moderation prevails.

I'd have to see specific examples. It's most likely that there was another version of the story that had gotten significant attention. It's also possible that some software made a bad call.

> HN shouldn't be used as a platform to push racially charged politics.

Surveillance is a staple topic of HN.

Can you explain how posting this article amounts to someone using "HN... as a platform to push racially charged politics"?

Let's not go into political battle about this here. It's clear that the topic touches on race and politics—that's obvious, and also superficial, and we needn't litigate it.

I interpreted "platform to push..." differently than the "topic touches on...".

But I agree we don't need a political battle here. Thank you dang.

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