Describing the popularity of this as "fetishistic reposting" says more about you than it does about this article's popularity. This is an article about hiring in the tech industry, and this is a forum read by people in that same industry. It's about a relevant political direction that has actual impact on the very community that reads this.

Twice daily fp reposts for three days, in the absence of any new information or insights seems fetishistic to me. At the very least it seems profoundly disrespectful to the mods.

Bashing Google over this on HN (and elsewhere) seems close to (persistent) astroturfing to me. It would be interesting to actually do the work and investigate where the various mentions on HN (and the original articles) come from.

But then again, this stuff sells in the news, so why suspect ulterior motives ;)

It breaks the site guidelines to insinuate that behavior you disagree with must be astroturfing. Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

I realize it's a very persuasive-feeling impression. It's increasingly the first thing people bring up to account for disagreement, but that is a huge problem. Overwhelmingly the real reason for disagreement is that people just disagree, and we get nowhere by pretending otherwise.

It shows how much people care about this matter. Most people doesn't come to HN everyday, and probably just saw it

That's true, but the bulk of the community cares even more about not having the front page filled with duplicates and follow-ups. That's why we moderate it the way we do.

It would have been good if we had caught the original post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16497551) getting penalized by the flamewar detector and turned that off. We often do that, and even have the software set up to email us notifications to check such things. Had the story had a few more hours on the front page, the point would be moot. Unfortunately we missed that and it's too late now. But the story is certain to develop further, and when significant new information is available, HN can have another big thread. Not before, though.