Because they very explicitly want to allow multiple discussions of the same item, spread over time? Normally, submitting an exact duplicate during a certain w

Because they very explicitly want to allow multiple discussions of the same item, spread over time? Normally, submitting an exact duplicate during a certain window (I don't know how long that window is) automatically translates submissions after the first, into upvotes for the first.[0] After that window, dupes are considered OK because $REASONS, where I presume the reasons include something like "some stories are some timeless and interesting that they deserve to be discussed multiple times", or a variation of the thinking behind XKCD #1053[1], and so on. See, for example: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=1&prefix=true&query=500%20mile%20email&sort=byPopularity&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=1&prefix=true&que... [0]: Or at least that used to be the case. And I've seen it first hand, so can definitely confirm that this sometimes happens. Or used to. But I tried one just now with something that's on the "newest" page and even though I submitted it with the exact same URL, the submission went through as a separate one. Not sure if something's broken, or if that is intentional behavior, perhaps there's more complexity to the rule about when the de-dupe behavior is displayed than I was aware of. Not sure. Weird. Addendum: tried a bunch more just now to see if maybe there's a pattern where some URL's trigger the de-dupe stuff and others don't, but everything I tried went through. My guess is that either the mods changed this intentionally for reasons that only they are privy to, or the de-duper is broken. But that's just a guess. [1]: https://xkcd.com/1053/ https://xkcd.com/1053/