I'd vote for a style of hand-merge mechanism that would - Take the title of the post with the most discussion - Turn it into a link like a poll, where each li

I'd vote for a style of hand-merge mechanism that would - Take the title of the post with the most discussion - Turn it into a link like a poll, where each link has it's own "interior" link - Throw all of the conversations from the posts and throw it into the main body of the combined post. Users keep the ability to gain points, the front page stays clean, and no data is lost. The only downside is there's no easy way to flag things as "merges", unless the ability to "flag to merge" is added for people at a certain karma level. Enough flags, it automatically rolls them together.