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!