Hacker News Reader

Comment by Forgeties79 | Hacker News Reader

It’s been 7mo and we’re not all here every day. It’s fine. I appreciate the post and discussion it sparked.

Why does it bother you?

Linking to past threads with comments (i.e. actual discussions) is a longstanding convention here. There's no implied criticism, as other users have already pointed out.

We do treat reposts as duplicates when a story has had significant attention in the last year or so (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html), but that's a separate issue.

Why are you interpreting it as a complaint, or an expression of being bothered?

Occasional reposts are well within HN's norms, and when something is reposted, it's common to link to past discussions for comparison.

Why do you think it bothers me? I wrote the original comment because previous discussions might be interesting reads.

Maybe prefixing with "Previous discussions" instead of "Posted here multiple times before" will not sound like complaining

The phrasing was matter of fact. And there is nothing inherently wrong with reposting. Certain other websites have developed a culture opposed to it, but I have yet to see that here.

Agreed, I actually tried and go back to change the wording to exactly that, but unfortunately it was already past the editing grace period. But lesson learned for next time.

It's really hard to find a phrase for this that people don't interpret as a complaint or criticism. It took me years before I hit on "Related", which seems just neutral enough to mostly avoid that misunderstanding (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com