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It is shit. Duplicate stories are arbitrarily allowed to be submitted (exact same article/url), while sometimes it actually works and prevents duplicates.

Oftentimes you see submissions for an interesting article languish in the 'new' section, but then a user re-submits the exact same thing ('duplicate detection' algo at work, lol) and it's on the front page in minutes. Whether that user is a 'power user', besties with dang, lucky, or ???..

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I think it would be more effort to write your vision of the submission process than what is probably there.

The algos is presumably a straight up string compare with some url decoding, but any amount of idiotic GET key value pairs can screw that up.

I find Occam's razor the best explanation for these kind of things - I suggest not taking it to heart too much.

> string compare with some url decoding

Perhaps page body edit-distance would work better?

> The algos is presumably a straight up string compare with some url decoding

Well, except it fails in some cases to straight up compare two strings that are identical, so there must be some other 'secret sauce' in the algorithm that makes it unnecessarily complicated and error-prone.

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