I wonder, it shouldn't be too hard to make a bot that automatically links to all previous discussions on each topic that's submitted...
Build it and Show HN
Doesnt HN disallow bits of any kind?
no bits have been harmed in the making of this website
It's not clear how to decide which threads to bundle together. Checking identical URLs is too narrow (e.g. the three threads mentioned have different URLs) and how to match by content isn't so easy.
With modern NLP models being extremely good, can't you bundle together all sites whose content embeddings are very close? Presumably there's an acceptable threshold somewhere that achieves a good tradeoff of false positives vs negatives?
It's possible. I haven't had time to look into it. If someone wanted to do a proof of concept it would certainly be interesting.