You mean leaving comments about highly related products/software/whatever with a different feature-set and approach? That sounds... perfect. It can spark all s

You mean leaving comments about highly related products/software/whatever with a different feature-set and approach? That sounds... perfect. It can spark all sorts of discussions and ideas about the decisions and tradeoffs made in both projects. All aspects of this - from the ideas themselves to the community response to them - can be very valuable to the original creators of both. It can also give the original creator more information about what's been done and how. Searching for similar stuff when you lack a very well-defined term can be annoyingly difficult. And it has what I think should be obvious value to the readers and commenters who are interested in originally posted product. Other similar projects may well serve any interested readers better than what was originally posted. Again, searching for this stuff can be difficult. Do you really want to remove this chance to discover a better-fitting product/project/whatever from all the readers? I see no problem with people posting similar projects. With the usual caveats of civility that apply to literally every other comment as well, these stand to be highly productive comments. I'm sure you're thinking of the more emotional aspects of this, and even here I disagree. The only situation I can think of where a poster is better off no even hearing about alternatives is if their main motivation is receiving praise on HN. And in that case, hopefully the situation will make it easier for them to realize that is what they are doing, and give them the opportunity to decide if that's something they want to continue doing.