Should you even call something out as a repost when the last time it was posted was 4 years ago?
After all, millions of people have been born and grown up during that time
I mean yeah that’s true.
But on reddit reposts were everywhere and it was very common for bots to karma farm by doing so, so calling it out had a purpose.
People who have already seen something know they’ve seen it. They can just skip it. To somebody else it will be new. The vast majority of items being called reposts on reddit were things I had never seen. Whining about reposts might give someone a false sense of accomplishment, but I found it to be useless noise.
One feature I feel like I want to see eventually is a list of links to reposts attached at the top of the post, so if someone reposts the same thing, or topic, or question, then if another person recognizes it and finds a previous link, the link could be added to the list and anyone who wants to see the “extended universe” of comments can browse them. That way discussion’s larger context is far more easy to see, and quality answers for example can be more easily found by anyone browsing after the link has been found.
I’m not sure if it would be if genuine utility, but people are already doing the work of finding these links to the past, I feel like we might as well make it official and make it a feature?
I’m curious what the rest of you think.
reposts should still probably be labelled as such and link back to older posts
My thoughts exactly. On reddit I used to reply to repost complaints, which I find annoying, by saying that they were the most reposted thing I saw. But tbh their frequency has seemed to decrease, almost as if they’re being auto-removed. If so, I appreciate it. A subject showing up repeatedly just means somebody’s still interested in it.
