Sure, posts to HN (or, say, most such places) should probably point to the original source unless some value is added in the other site. I can see that some va

Sure, posts to HN (or, say, most such places) should probably point to the original source unless some value is added in the other site. I can see that some value is added to subscribers of that Posterous feed, however, since it means fewer links to follow and guarantees readable text. So, I am unconvinced that this is a problem with the Posterous community. The reposter is minimizing the effort to consume content for his followers. That the souece link is small is inconsequential--the entire quotation is explicitly formatted and hence immediately understood as such. All one has to do to see the original formatting, discussion, etc. is follow a link; maybe the Posterous user estimates that less than the weighted majority of his audience wants to visit the full site at the point of Posterous consumption. To criticize the use of what is really a feed aggregator for doing just that is a bit like criticizing evolution. Maybe the reposter decided that the content was important enough to reproduce in full to increase the odds of its consumption by his subscribers. Hell, I'll read Jessica Livingston's textual content in Posterous but rarely follow most links from gmail if just catching up on a mobile device. In fact, an arument might be made that a higher quality of content/traffic is achieved in the long run for Quora due to the ability of posts like this to dissemminate its content. That said, I barely use Posterous, so a member of the "community" would be in a better position to comment (and maybe this has already occurred theough the upvoting of the parent), but I felt like the parent had some pretty harsh words which needed to be addressed due to their generality. Are there some studies on short format content reproduction producing a net detriment (and no wisecracks about ehow)?