finally understand what people were complaining about... you're right that's really annoying.

So doing Related: as a method to link threads with each other is an eyesore, and unpopular. And thus, that's a failed experiment.

When there's wide interest in a topic (e.g., the Bitcoin for Truckers / Tallycoin story, the Russia to treat bitcoin as currency story, the DOJ arrest of the Bitfinex hackers, etc.) there will be articles posted from numerous media sources, including not just our industry media (e.g., Bitcoin Magazine, CoinDesk, etc.) but that with a bit wider reach (e.g., Vice, ZeroHedge) and even mainstream media (e.g., BBC, FoxNews).

I forget what they do to accommodate this problem on Reddit ... where there are moderators who have tools such as lock comments, shadow ban, or even ability to delete outright. If I remember correctly, for duplicate stories on a single event, don't they lock the duplicates and tag those with something about there being numerous duplicates, and to check the front page? I don't even remember.

Other platforms, (Stack Exchange, and Quora, I think) do a good just of showing links to similar / related pages. That's loosely what I was aiming for, but ya -- that is resulting in more harm than good being done.

Elsewhere, I've seen like a superthread, so that conversation on that event / topic (e.g, Bitcoin for Truckers) occurs within a single post, no matter how many Posts with articles on the same topic get submitted. But with SN, I don't know how or if some consolidation would be possible, or even desirable.

Posting various articles for the same story (not an identical duplicate, but articles covering the same story from different online media) would likely earn little or nothing, for the person who posts them and thus there's no economic incentive for those to be posted. But for the exposure gained from being on SN, there may be numerous online media outlets that will submit every new story they publish as a post on SN, whether it earns any sats or not. I don't know if the switch to using the SN WoT helps to (or will help to) lessen visibility of those, like what would happen on a moderated platform.

But since doing those replies with Related: is received negatively (I suppose, it is a form of DDoS), I won't be doing anymore of those, unless there's explicit reason (e.g., "your question got a great answer over in [link to some other post].")

As an (minor) upside. it looks like this little experiment resulted in an example of how unwanted user behavior can be controlled by a design change.

It might’ve. I’ll try to deploy something today.