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votes
Do duplicates need to be pointed out, or do we not care?
Looking at the Activity page right now, there are 2 different pointers to 2 different articles about turning off auto-play on Netflix. I totally get why people are excited about this!
My question is, do we care about duplicates? Some forums ask people to notify a mod and they combine the threads. Others just let them be. Is there an official stance on this here?
At its current size, Tildes is more like one community that's lightly subdivided, so posting the same topic into multiple groups isn't really necessary and generally ends up more like clutter than anything helpful. If I see it happen, I'll usually try to decide which group seems "most correct" and remove the other(s).
In the future when it's larger and the groups are more like their own communities, duplicates will probably make more sense.
As mentioned, there is already a check that tells people that a particular link has already been submitted (even to other groups) when people submit the exact same link, but that doesn't always happen. I'm planning to add a "report" process to topics fairly soon, that people would be able to use to get my attention to a duplicate if I don't notice it.
I don't know what the site philosophy is, but to me I think duplicates within groups would be bad in they were active concurrently, but activity in different groups is fine.
In this example, it's probably relevant to multiple groups, so it makes sense to have it in multiple places. FWIW, I've only seen one of them.
I've dropped a politely worded message in a few duplicate posts in the past. Sometimes these things aren't apparent to the poster immediately and it's a nice heads-up in case they wish to delete it.