Nothing in the linked thread says anything about an admin changing that feature and soon realizing how repetitive the site became.
OP asked why it was happening. Someone else told them how to fix it. OP thanked them, thinking it was a bug. Codinghorror said it’s bad form to quote an entire thread and added “why add that duplication to the stream… it’s noise for all future readers”.
But Discourse will happily remove both the arrow AND the quote, leaving you with only context, which doesn’t always make it clear.