I see this as an inevitable consequence of several deliberate design features. It's a link-sharing site, and people get karma for popular links. The votes serve to make the items rise on the front page, getting more votes, hence more karma.
So people will rush to be first, and there is no serious mechanism to check whether the same story, or even the nearly exact same link has been submitted before.
But anything more sophisticated will be more complex, harder to understand, more fragile, and possibly less popular. It's not hard to see several things that might make it better, but it's uncertain, more work, and guaranteed to make the system less transparent.
<fx: shrug />
To some extent it is what it is. But FWIW, I agree.
Reddit does a simple link comparison to see if the article has been submitted before, which does limit the double-posts, however some people then intentionally subvert the process by running the link through a processor like outline.com or archive.is, or simply finding alternate articles from other sources.
This is unfortunate as the thing I really want to see is an in-depth conversation about a topic more than an individual article.
So people will rush to be first, and there is no serious mechanism to check whether the same story, or even the nearly exact same link has been submitted before.
But anything more sophisticated will be more complex, harder to understand, more fragile, and possibly less popular. It's not hard to see several things that might make it better, but it's uncertain, more work, and guaranteed to make the system less transparent.
<fx: shrug />
To some extent it is what it is. But FWIW, I agree.