Note he copied his own comment... Which the majority of people wouldn't have seen otherwise because nobody goes through all the threads of all the reposts to see what was discussed back then.
Please don't teach people how to self-censor.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Submissions and comments play different roles. Submissions provide topics for conversation. Once enough time has gone by—on HN, about a year—the cache is considered clear and the floor is open for a fresh conversation on that topic. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
> Please don't teach people how to self-censor.
You could say that about any rule that asks users to do one thing rather than another. I think most people here would support "please don't copy/paste into the threads" as serving the overall quality of the forum rather than seeing it as a censorship issue. This is the sort of case where it's probably good to have a rule, since the thing we want to avoid is having copy/pasting become common.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
And I totally see a scenario where copy paste makes sense. Maybe the person wanted to have a discussion about their idea and there wasn't enough engagement (for whatever reason) previously. Repeating (and copy-pasting) the same idea with the hope that this time it gets discussion and cleared up seems totally fine.
Even in real life people do totally repeat themselves.
Anyhoo, you seem to be some sort of admin, so I guess this is important for you folks.
My 2c.