Yes. The problem here is that there was a big one of those just yesterday. HN does poorly with repetition, and throwing in the indignation aspect and the meta aspect (can you believe what an HN commenter said yesterday? the nerve!) guarantees that the thread will get high and go crazy. None of that is intentional, but it's a well-known failure mode, so the flags in this case were helpful. We've taken the [flagged] stigma off the title above, so as not to rub salt in any wounds.

The system has checks and balances to prevent such things from dominating discussion here. (Flags are part of that system; so are software bells and whistles; so are moderators). If we didn't have those, the front page would consist of nothing but sensational flamewars and endless towers of meta!

> We've taken the [flagged] stigma off the title above, so as not to rub salt in any wounds.

Sending it to page 2 when it's only 3 hours old and has more upvotes than almost everything on page 1 /and/ removing the [flagged] marker feels weirder to me than not doing anything, but eh.

The ranking aims for interestingneses, not points so it makes sense to rank down a discussion of the merits Go a day after the front page has had a long discussion of the merits of Go. Taking off the flagged helps with the 'why was this flagged' meta (a little late now but still) since fewer people assume there is something wrong with the post, other than it happening to be a dupe on HN.

There's nothing I can say about "this is not actually the same article" and "the two comment sections do not say the same thing at all" that hasn't already been said by many other HN users in response to this moderation thread, so, I'll leave it there, still disappointed.

I haven't read them all and it's not wrong that they aren't the same article or the same discussion but it's HN-wrong. It's definitely disappointing if you have a big J. Winnfieldean 'allow me to retort' lined up but it works that way for pretty decent, time-tested reasons which I think have also been explained in great detail in the various moderation parables and proverbs.

Is there anything that can be done the next time the old 2020 post goes FP, to direct people to consider the 2022 followup as well? Or is that burden of “seriously, stop rehashing 2020 content instead of keeping up with the discussion” exclusively the author’s to bear?

Given the options I know of today for authors, if they’re still reading comments here, I’d recommend they replace the 2020 post with a redirect to the 2022 post, and include the 2020 post at the end of it fully intact. At least that would ensure the flamewars cycle on the complete conversation and not just half of it.