Human interaction is not code. Human discussion is not code. People are not code. Repetition is how people learn and understand things. Seeing a point once makes a person think "oh good point". Seeing many times forces them to think of it in different contexts and different ways. This allows them to understand it better.
Congratulations to you for being around long enough, and seeing this point enough times, that you find it commonplace. I guarantee however that there are plenty of people here who still need to see it. There are lots of people on this site who are very intelligent in many ways who make comments like "you need to protect your patent or you lose it" or "copyright doesn't count unless registered". As long as they exist, this point can be made without it just being echo chamber fodder.
And what determines what is important vs. what is not? Certainly something like spam is pure noise, but what justifies the repetition? I'm trying very hard not to see it as consensual groupthink, but coming up short. I see this in every community: a set of near-sacrosanct 'truths' emerges that inevitably must be defended, and part of that process involves repeating them, often under the guise of 'educating' others.
IMO, the argument is simply being reframed to avoid dealing with the larger and more difficult problem. I'm not interested in avoiding the real issue here -- compensation for creators in the age of easily-copied goods.
If we fix that, the semantics argument won't be an issue. After all, if we have a just system that fairly compensates individuals for creating while providing good incentives for consumers not to infringe, we don't need to nitpick about theft v. infringe.This, to me, serves as a good indication of what is actually important in this issue.
Perhaps the argument is being reframed back and forth, not to avoid an issue, but as proxy to this issue: creators are over-valuing their work and/or copiers undervaluing. The semantics chosen are done so because they reflect the point of view of the speaker. Put a different way: there are 2 ideas of fair out there, each set of semantics represents one idea of fair accurately.
Simple repetition can be a powerful way to get people to change their minds but I suspect in this sort of environment it doesn't work so well as those who disagree simply don't read it once they establish the basic gist and just skip the post. As a result it's not really being repeated to them in any way that matters.
My experience tends to be that if I've not won someone over with one particular argument then my best tack is to try something else they might be more responsive to rather than just keep repeating myself.
But maybe the real issue is that I hope that HN might be a source of intelligent discussion on the subject with an attempt to find interesting and / or practical solutions to the problems raised rather than a more straight forward continual reassertion of views that could frankly be carried out by a series of Python scripts.
Congratulations to you for being around long enough, and seeing this point enough times, that you find it commonplace. I guarantee however that there are plenty of people here who still need to see it. There are lots of people on this site who are very intelligent in many ways who make comments like "you need to protect your patent or you lose it" or "copyright doesn't count unless registered". As long as they exist, this point can be made without it just being echo chamber fodder.