Just curious - since you switched the URL, why did you credit this version instead of the one I submitted about an hour earlier? My submission was even referenced in a thread you'd replied to.
When a link from a HN post is changed, and the link it's changed-to had previously been submitted by another user, should the "posted by" and karma attribution get re-assigned to the user who submitted the link to-which the story is re-pointed, or does attribution and karma continue to credit the user who submitted the link which was replaced? Just curious how the internals of link-replacement works.
It's the latter. We do try to privilege the original submission when we can, but that's not always easy.
It's a bit of a lottery who gets the karma in any individual case, but in the long run it evens out. We would like to make the duplicate detection system give more credit to original submitters. I used to think that didn't matter, but have changed my mind, because doing that would incentivize users to find good stories that no one has submitted yet, and that seems like it would be in the community's interest.
Thanks for the answer. Karma, while fun, isn't personally that big of a deal. Appreciate the clarification, and thanks for your continued oversight of the HN community.
