Ask HN: What does the past link have to do with my submission?

You're asking for exactness as if the interpretation of a submission is a mathematical formula. It isn't. Readers with flagging power are going to look at your submission and make subjective, biased, inductive calls about whether to flag, upvote, downvote, comment, and/or ignore.

In other words, don't take it personally.

I don’t think the phrasing would’ve make a big difference. The person the question was about is a political commentator and somebody must have expected the comment section will be about Canada politics as well.

The “past” link is dumb and automated. It just links to a title search. Usually used to find duplicate stories. For example if somebody submits a story about a breaking-news topic that has been submitted 10 times from other sources in short amount of time. It’s not meant to link to a specific story, what you saw is likely a random result.

It could be its pre-emptive to risk. I can't but think a conversation to JP is going to descend into name-calling. All it needs is a crosslink to Rogan and it's sure to fire off.

And I say that, as somebody who is very likely to be contributing to the mess because I am unsure I can restrain myself from polemic. Dislike of these individuals shouldn't colour honest debate, but I struggle with this. I don't believe in some (false) moral euivalency here, and I know that has direct impact on the quality of discourse.

Given that 54 of your last 60 submits (90%!) were Ask HNs, perhaps you are overusing this feature.

Stranger yet: here is the link to what "Past" sends me to:

I just searched for "Ask HN: Opinions on Jordan Peterson?" on Hacker News - Hacker News Search https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Ask%20HN%3A%20Opinions%20on%20...