

Ask HN: Why kill duplicate discussions? - jpwagner

I think it may be more common than it used to be that the following situation occurs:<p>1.  Some article/topic gets posted<p>2.  There is a non-trivial discussion on the topic<p>3.  Someone posts a link to an earlier HN post discussing the same article/topic x days ago<p>4.  Article goes dead, discussion is killed<p>This model works well if the user-base is so small that everyone reads every article/discussion.  But HN has grown.  Why should it be killed simply because a different group already touched upon it?<p>What if the new discussion takes a different route?  If it is truly the same article/discussion, shouldn't these be merged?
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mbrubeck
The front page is more useful and interesting to me if it doesn't feature the
same links over and over again.

There should be a statue of limitations, and it seems that in practice
duplicates that are months or years old are less likely to be flagged and
killed than duplicates that are days or weeks old.

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jpwagner
Seems silly to suppose that the rationale is to protect against all links
being the same?

Shouldn't the same discussion be merged?

(BTW, if you post an exact duplicate link, you will be forwarded to the
original rather than actually posting.)

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TallGuyShort
I agree that there certainly can be new discussion on the same link, but I
appreciate seeing links to previous submissions so that I can see the
discussion that already occurred there, too.

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ScottWhigham
Merged - yes. That makes sense. Is that not what is being done already?

