That's the way a popular site with 30 slots on its front page has to work. For any hot story, there are a zillion me-too follow-up articles like the arstechnica one above. Since the story is hot, they'll all get upvoted. If we don't mark them as dupes, they take over. I guarantee you the community doesn't want that. In fact, almost everything we do is determined by the community pressure that happens if we don't do it.

This does mean that a hot story will get a big discussion yet many readers never see the thread. But that's true of every thread; it follows from the structure of the site. The way around this is to use HN search to find the discussion, or links like https://news.ycombinator.com/active and https://news.ycombinator.com/lists. Edit: or just look at the second page!

I understand what you are saying, but in this case the story isn’t represented at all on the front page. If the story was allowed to have its run, then, sure, see that discussion, but if it was flagged off or demoted for some reason, I don’t see how the dupe flag is serving s purpose.

I did learn about /active, which might be better than the front page for my purposes. I probably wouldn’t have said something if I was looking there instead.