moderators are not omnipresent, and some times the users are faster to react than the mods.

Is that possible?

Dupes generally drop off the front page, whether or not someone links up the previous stories in the thread. The whole point is not to let the duplicate story crowd out other stories on the front page. Redirecting would defeat the purpose.

We do redirect to earlier posts that had the exact same URL. But most dupes, in the sense of repeated posts about the same story, don't have the exact same URL. What do you do then? That's a hard problem. It would be great to have an automated solution to that but I don't know of one.

sorry for replying late, thanks for the reply - [0]

... that is a hard question, something akin to topic amalgamation or cosine similarity on the bulletpoints?

could one (semi)automatically ask the community to confirm if story foo and story bar are both sufficiently simultaneous about baz?

.... is there any dataset one might be able to play around with on this topic?

[0] there's like 3 good mods left online and you are one of them, so thanks for that.

> something akin to topic amalgamation or cosine similarity

Yup. We played with that years ago and dropped it as much too big of a potato. Another HN user spent a lot of time working on it and eventually gave up too. Someone should have a go using the newer AI tools though.

> could one (semi)automatically ask the community to confirm if story foo and story bar are

Also yup - building support for the community to take care of this is how we plan to do it, whenever we get to working on it. I think this could work well because people care about this problem.