Ask HN: Is there a better way to handle dupes on HN?

A recent post of mine was marked as a dupe and it sudddenly dropped from #1 on the front page to #172. I couldn't find any past links article so I asked HN to investigate. Here's the conversation that followed. HN: The top comment in that thread links to the Hacker News discussion of another Harvard article from the same day. The titles of these two articles don’t overlap very much, surprisingly, so it would’ve been difficult indeed to have found the previous one. ME: Understood. But why mark my post as a dupe, especially because 172 days have elapsed since the first post. What criteria do you use to mark articles as dupes? My understanding is that this practice is encouraged by YC. And why did my post drop from #1 to #172 on the front page? HN: Ah, sorry! I should’ve clarified that stories are considered duplicates if they’d received significant attention in the past year or so. I know this seems like a long time, but it’s surprisingly effective for balancing new with older-but-still-relevant content. Duplicates are then given a heavy rank penalty so that they don’t push other stories further down. ME: This policy seems short-sighted. You essentially killed the momentum of this thread. If you actually read the comments, I think you would agree that the level of quality during this latest iteration was very high. I think this policy is a form of de facto censorship, because of the way HN works (top articles trend for short periods and then the crowd moves on to something else). The long-term solution is obvious (at least to me) and it would obviate your current policy. You need to write software that merges duplicates in a rational way. It should be reliable, automatic, and transparent to the community. There should be only one canonical HN link to a given article, and it should aggregate all comments about the article throughout its history on your site.