Re:Orion – New WebKit Browser
by pvg on Thursday June 02, 2022 @09:36AM
(#31594693)
They are effectively the same story, the dupes go by story sameyness rather than article identity.
[ Parent
| on HN ]
Right. That's the policy that's bad.
You can try to come up with a better one but one based on identity runs up against the constraint of there being only 30 spots on the front page and the site's charter of interestingness.
The better policy is simple: the dupe system should only be used for identical articles. There is no harm in allowing two threads about the "same story" to ride out the front page nor is there any reason to combine their comments.
Though unforeseen consequences of this suggested policy are possible I think they're unlikely and I don't believe anyone can reliably predict them without trying it.
As dang likes to point out, internet discourse is mostly stateless. Combining duplicates that aren't really duplicates does nothing to improve this situation.
There is no harm
Two (or what your suggestion implies, N) nearly identical interesting things on the front page is less interesting than two different interesting things on the front page.
This is, in fact, a problem that afflicted HN more or less right off the bat as it does any crowdsourced link aggregator - Erlang days, etc. It is, as you say, entirely predictable and crushes interestingness.