I see that Reddit.com is up in arms over duplicate submissions again. While the heat will flare up and die down on Reddit, this is a common complaint of all social news sites from Digg to Slashdot. When a repeat submitter is confronted, they’ll often defend themselves with a claim such as, “This gives people who haven’t seen it before a chance to see it now.”

Well, sure, but if we want to see the old news going back to the dawn of the Internet, we know where to find it. And since we’re all on social news sites and many of us browse multiple sites in this age of RSS, chances are good that everybody who cared saw it the first time.

Meanwhile, there are very good reasons why duplicates hurt a social news site. These are:

1. It annoys the users. That, right there, would be reason enough in a world where common sense was common. Perhaps the starship Enterprise can discover such a world out there someday.

2. It promotes spam. Spammers find out that they can get infinite traffic just by popping up with the same link every two months.

3. It creates a clique. The same small group of “power elite” buddies end up re-submitting each other’s sites and voting each other up. Legitimate users can’t get a submission through.

4. It chokes out new submissions. There is plenty of new content on the web every day, which gets pushed down when duplicate content hogs the top of the list. In some cases, user bases of social news sites have slipped into antiquity, since all they see is the same circle of memes going around and around while the rest of the world has major news happening.

5. It wastes resources. Why take up another slot in your database with the same link, when fewer and fewer users will even visit it each time? Even when breaking news happens and manages to get into the submission cue, forty duplicate submissions of the same story appear on the front page all at once, followed by at least ten posts by people yelling at the submitters to quit submitting the dupes. That’s an extra 240 megabytes on your server to report a story that, had you prevented duplicates, would have taken up only 5 megabytes.

6. It’s anti-business. New content creators and new website owners can’t get traffic, because the duplicated content from years ago is clogging up the system.

7. It’s boring to read the same thing over and over again.

8. It’s boring to read the same thing over and over again.

9. It’s boring to read the same thing over and over again.

10. It’s boring to read the same thing over and over again.

Popularity: 3% [?]

Related Posts:

• The State of Social Networking
• Links, links, everywhere, nor anything to read…
• Social News Solution Form
• Top 7 Reasons Why I Didn’t RTFA
• It’s Traffic Day (Or: Digg is Over-Rated)

---