Hmm. It's an interesting point.

I'm not entirely clear on the purpose of the rule. It makes sense to not just increase the redundancy of anything people have said in other threads that have already got a lot of attention, but I'm sure there's plenty of interesting stuff buried deep in comment threads that haven't got much light and might be worth sharing. Conversely, there will be some quotes here from outside LW/OB that a high proportion of readers have seen already.

So it's definitely something that made sense when the LW/OB community was smaller and there wasn't much good stuff that people weren't seeing anyway, but perhaps it's time to relax the rule a little bit, replace it with the substance.