83 points and dozens of comments is well over the threshold for considering a repost a dupe (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html), whether or not it was flagged, and generally speaking that threshold should be tightened if an article was flagged, not loosened. Otherwise flagging doesn't mean very much.
I made the call to turn the flags off on this one and merge the comments from the previous thread in here, because the discussion has been managing to stay (barely) on the ok side, and the article seems to me to be about an interesting new phenomenon (a la https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).
If you don’t mind some feedback for the way posts are marked, read on. :)
There is no doubt that the post is technically a dupe.
I realize now (from your comment) that a post can be flagged either for its content or the content of the conversation. I was only thinking of the former, and under that system it would make a lot more sense for things to get marked consistently (ie if a link is flagged, it is flagged if it gets reposted). That allows us to understand better what things are allowed here and what are not. A dupe flag tells me that there is nothing wrong with the link or the type of content it contains (or the conversation that took place under it, for that matter.) If somebody had not posted the link to the original, I would have never known that the article had been removed for its content (again or the conversation). I would have thought I simply missed the discussion.
In fact, that’s precisely what happened to me. Since I was enjoying it, I clicked through to the older post, only to get whiplash as I discovered that it was a conversation that was apparently not allowed here.
I hope that explains why I felt so frustrated and misled by the [dupe] flag, and that it t is a help to you in your moderation work.
Edited to add: To be clear, my point was not to allow the conversation to continue (though I’m glad you did). My point was that the second removal should get marked the same way so it’s clear what is going on.
I made the call to turn the flags off on this one and merge the comments from the previous thread in here, because the discussion has been managing to stay (barely) on the ok side, and the article seems to me to be about an interesting new phenomenon (a la https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).