Yeah, every post having an image doesn't help, but the same username/avatar repeated so much is a lot of noise too. If the point of a thread is 'microblogging' then it really needs third-party replies removed, and not such repetition.
well duplicate posting lowers the signal/noise ratio too.
how about, maybe, deleting the duplicate posting instead of bothering people that contributes with genuine personal opinions based on first-hand experience?
Tangentially, I always found the discussion flow on image boards interesting because of the "anonymous chorus" of replies.
It creates special patterns: cryptic references to spot non-initiates, people role-playing a straw man and replying to themselves, shunning people using confirmed user names, etc. There is jargon for all of this but it is too offensive for this venue.
Can you point me to the requests to stop? I've seen exactly one, a long time ago. I'm not personally attacking people, and I do contribute here with a positive upvote score. I don't see the issue.
Edited my comment to clarify some things, but a solution is that if someone points out a thread is a potential dupe, be more open to the possibility of merging that discussion?
Especially since the bulk other thread was already talking about privacy concerns and most users would go down that route.
Also, you already do a great job moderating here, but this is just one of those few situations where I'm in disagreement with you on this particular instance.
Most of the problems you'd want to avoid could probably be solved if you get rid of the images, and required people to sign up but still post anonymously.
Granted, then it's no longer strictly an anonymous imageboard but in a lot of cases, the images don't add to the discussion anyway.
I'm genuinely curious as to why you think having two separate but related threads on a forum is of any consequence. It seems that every other minute someone here dramatizes these submissions, as if having a line of text in the feed that you're not personally interested in is somehow akin to the tragedies of rape and murder (hyperbole intended).
I assure you, the people constantly complaining about every submission is far more annoying than the occasional (subjectively) extraneous submission.
It seems to me that the ability to merge threads (either automatically or through moderator action) would benefit this, and the problem of multiple posts on the same subject in general.
Although I don't agree with seeing popular, user generated content as a negative, but it's not my sandbox. I think it's at least better than yet another Techcrunch post or ceaseless bickering about class warfare and internecine SV politics.
Also, perhaps these threads should automatically expire weekly.
Here usually the idea is to link previous post only when they have a lot of discussion, or some small but very important discussion.
It sucks when you post something and someone else post it again and get more traction, but it's difficult to avoid. The alternative is to block the post forever, that is also bad. The mods are trying to do something about it, but I guess it will not be soon, you probably have to wait a few years ...
(It seams easy, but it's a hard problem. The easy checks probably have very bad corner cases, and in these cases they make the changes slowly, very slowly. Don't hold your breath.)
I agree it would cause problems with the discussion threads, but a solution to this would be for HN to substitute the username & message with "Removed due to GDPR request" or similar.
While I sympathize with your concern, and agree with you, pasting the same comment repeatedly in a thread is likely to get you slapped by the admins. They don't like it, and most of us need not read the same comment three or more times.
It gets rather simple pretty quickly if you look at the site as a whole: accounts that repeatedly post like that one did have a destructive effect on the community, just like fire has on a town. We know it's mostly unintentional, but the flames don't burn less for that reason. We want the town to survive, so we can't let people do this here.
The analogy is good in another way too: we don't care what color the flames are, or what was used to start them. People sometimes complain that we moderate red flames more than blue and vice versa, but the issue is the same in both cases.
I'm not ignoring it, nor asking anyone to do so. I agree with your post.
I merely ask whether we need dozens of pretty much the exact same posts day-in, day-out. Nothing more. And I'm certainly NOT self-inducing blindness to this situation, sorry if it came across as such.
I think the complaintent is right that an image like that might drive some people away.
Of course I don't really think that repelling hyper-sensitive social justice warriors is a negative thing. Folks like that are going to burn up far more project bandwidth on debates like that than they could ever possibly contribute. The last thing your open source project needs is a 200 comment thread on whether or not all occurrences of master/slave should be replaced with parent/child, doh I mean, primary/secondary.
Yes, those are much harder to deal with because we can't simply switch them off—other than disabling replies, which I don't want to do because most replies are good faith questions.
I've even written code to specifically monitor all the replies that get posted in those threads, but it still requires moderator review energy—a scarce commodity if ever there was one.
Can we stop this, please? Any post whining about "redditification" is infinitely more annoying than any actual incidence of that phenomenon (if it even exists.)
Every time this comes people complain and whine that it would ruin the sub. I'm on the side that posting images should be banned. In subs I've seen this implemented it's helped content a lot.
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