>It's official (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html), and it's not limited to Show HNs.

Are reposts ok?

If a story has not had significant attention in the last year or so, a small number of reposts is ok. Otherwise we bury reposts as duplicates.

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Unfortunately, since there's no penalty for spamming the site with endless repeat posts of articles already submitted countless times before, people continue to do it. Contrast that with the comments section, where there are penalties for abusive behaviour and people generally tend to behave in a more respectful way to other HN-ers.

I wonder; if the system really did check for duplication [I can't believe it does, given the number of repeat posts I see] and if people lost a karma point* for submitting an article that had already been submitted X times within the last X hours or days, would we see a lot less 'submission spamming'?

*Assuming that the people posting what are obviously repeat submission are doing so for the 'internet points' rather than from any genuine belief that they're sharing something new with us, that might actually be a deterrent.