Thanks for the karmadecay link. Before posting I did several searches for several variants of the image filename, the original source URL I was taking it from, and a lot of keywords using both google and reddit's own search. I also checked TinEye.

Although I'm not sure I entirely agree with kleinbl00, your post is polite and helpful, which is useful to someone who has been on reddit for less than a month. Thanks.

Other posters, however, have just waded in with shouty-caps blazing, which is…less helpful. To be honest, I think that kind of aggressive condescension is more damaging to a site than reposting could be. There's a bullying sneer to a lot of it that is really really off-putting.

As I write, 2483 people liked the image enough to upvote it. It's a reasonable assumption that they, like me, had not seen it before. There's a value in posting something like that, even allowing for kleinbl00's concerns. r/aww seems to get about 700-750 images per day, and that's just one subreddit, so even with upvotes and "what's hot" the likelihood of missing something good somewhere is probably pretty high unless you spend the whole day trawling the whole site. You've been on here five months longer than me so you've been around for about 100,000 r/aww images that I haven't. Inevitably, people who've been around longer are more likely to have seen things before, which apparently entitles some of them to forget about a site being a sharing community and instead act like patronizing asshats to more recent arrivals.

Just to be clear, this_is_not_rage, these criticisms are NOT directed at you. Your post was polite and helpful.

If reposting is so very damaging then reddit should automate checks like karmadecay. In the meantime, the site seems to be doing just fine, so until then I'm not going to call it reposting: I'm going to call it karma-quantitative easing :)