Also, I think there are two kinds of links, "original story" links, and "what are people saying" links. For example if you are for some reason genuinely interested in AirBnB as a business, both the original story AND what tech crunch are saying about it is potentially of interest, if you believe techcrunch is an influential source that can affect AirBnB's prospects.
As to the OP, I wish for what some of the open source bugzillas do - when you submit a bug on, say, cups printing with foo driver, the system does a search on those keywords and presents you with bugs that may be duplicate. I don't think that "forces" the user to do research, but assuming a well meaning user, which most of us are, it allows them to realize there is an ongoing discussion and join that.
The problem I haven't figured out is how you would implement this with the bookmarklet - the main site submission would be straighforward.
Clearly giving the whiners whatever they ask to make them shut up isn't good for the community. You teach them that whining gives them what they want, which will just make the whining worse because it becomes a successful tool.
There's an important distinction between "we don't negotiate with terrorists" and "we will never implement a worthwhile feature if it was requested in a disrespectful manner".
Take the Zed Shaw + dongml story [1]. Zed's behavior was silly, but the loophole needed to be closed regardless and so it was.
