zlacker

I see this problem in every social news site, and also here: it seems that over a few days, 3 or 4 posts will eventually refer to exactly the same "news". But unless the duplicate submission has the same URL, the redundancy isn't detected.

Users should be able to flag new posts as duplicates, and identify the "older" headline to use instead.

If enough users agree that a post is redundant, then it would become "merged". The oldest submission on that topic is then rewarded all vote-up karma points from all duplicates, and displays all comment threads. In addition, the duplicates either go away or are displayed side-by-side with the original in all lists, avoiding the problem where the "same" story is front-page news under one title and page 5 under another name.