zlacker

>>pg+(OP)
Some policy/feature/system to aggregate related stories ("killing" stories that duplicate stories that already have active threads, and posting a link to the "duplicate" story in that thread, or something similar to that --- I'm being minimalist here).

A lot of dumb comments appear to germinate on threads that are the 3rd or 4th take on some tech news story about Facebook or Apple.

>>tptace+E
A related problem is blogspam. If the original source material was submitted a while ago but didn't get many upvotes, there is a huge incentive for people to mirror the content or link to a site that links to the original.

I think a more useful metric than "number of votes since submission" would be "number of votes in the past hour/day/whatever." That way an item could be submitted days in the past, but still get on the front page if it had enough upvotes recently. For testing purposes, this could be an alternate front page like http://news.ycombinator.com/classic

Another option would be to have moderators manually de-dupe stories or fix them to link to the original source. While they're at it, the mods could ban or reduce the karma of users who submit blogspam or duplicate stories.