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Ask HN: Why is “My Bathroom Mirror is Smarter Than Yours” being posted so much?

6 points by davelnewton ↗ HN
This has been posted so many times-possibly dozens. Why? How?

Is someone trying to game this Medium story for some reason? If so, why does HN keep allowing it to appear over and over?

(14 times at last count, with tweaky URL settings to deliberately bypass HN's dupe posting filter.)

8 comments

[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 27.8 ms ] thread
echolima
I'm sure he has invested some very serious cash into something he should not be spending that much time looking at, and now he wants a return on investment by building a readership; cue the submission bots/friends/family to spread the word.
davelnewton
I wish I had that many friends; this is nuts.
ocdtrekkie
Medium seems to have some URL cruft at the end of it that is unique for different users, and it doesn't seem like HN knows how to dedupe that.
gus_massa
Duplication is usual problem with Medium stories.

In this case the story is interesting enough to submit and gain a few points, but not enough to get to the front page, so it's not easy to link to the previous main discussion and try to keep all the comments there.

A similar problem has the "Banned by Tesla (I)" and "Banned by Tesla (II)" stories. I think one of them was more lucky, but I'm not paying too much attention because I think it's a pointless discussion.

I remember a few previous case, were one submission was very successful (front page and many points+comments) and it was unintentionally resubmitted many many many times: "The resolution of the Bitcoin experiment", "The Sad State of Web Development", "Paul Graham Is Still Asking to Be Eaten"

ocdtrekkie
Medium seems a common enough share source these days that it might be worth HN looking into filtering out the junk at the end of the URL for deduplication checking.
dang
It's on our list.