> Many reviewers are abusing the system and asking for ridiculous comparison to recently-posted preprint papers. Bald-faced flag-planting should not be rewarded. And we should not be faulted by reviewers for failing to compare against 2-week old algorithms that may or may not work.

The context seems pretty clear to me. Your example clearly is covered by the first case: if it influenced your work, you cite it, even if it is "nonsense". You can't just "decide" something didn't have influence if it had. (These rules do not prevent cheating, they are guides for people acting ethically)

The second rule is to prevent the opposite case: You shouldn't be forced to create the impression your work is based on or just a mere repeat of someone else's "who had the idea first" when they have no good claim to that, or inferior to something that hasn't been shown to be actually better.

I don't get the distinction. Nobody expects you to cite something which you didn't read, or which didn't influence your work.

The question here is whether you should cite something which you did read, and does relate to your work, even if it's a shitty flag-planting paper.

If you think it's shitty, then you can cite and dismiss it in a sentence. You can dismiss 30 papers in a single sentence if you like. There's no requirement to wax lyrical for 3 paragraphs about a paper just because it was first. But it strikes me as dishonest to advocate that sole researchers become arbiters of a paper's merit, citing or not citing it at their personal discretion.

Also, if their paper was published first then that's the only claim necessary to demonstrate that they were first out with the idea.

The point is exactly that it happens that reviewers demand comparisons with other work you haven't read yet. And while missing an established publication that influences your findings is a fault on your part and totally fair critique, "missing" something that didn't exist when your work happened is obviously not something you can control.

> Also, if their paper was published first then that's the only claim necessary to demonstrate that they were first out with the idea.

To quote myself: impression your work is based on or just a mere repeat of someone else's, not just being first. Ideally, everyone looking at you referencing it would take note that it was published months after you started work and your work was independent (or even earlier), but that easily gets lost.

Should you be encouraged to throw out every idea and snippet to arXiv just so you can claim "FIRST!" in case it turns out to be useful/true, over "competing" works that spent more effort on quality and verification and are now in peer-review forced to reference you as the pioneer (even if you maybe had the idea months later, but rushed it out and got lucky with it holding up)? That's what the "flagplanting" is about.