"I submit that "dupe" is a misleading misnomer if the submission does not link to the same content"
Imagine every time you make a submission the same commenter submits a reply with only a different thread URL, no title, no story URL, and the misnomer "[dupe]"
But the story URLs are different, not duplicates
It makes no sense
This site has constant repetition of URLs, topics and comments
It has 250+ pages of active stories at any one time. That's potentially 250+ different discussions
There is nothing in the design to prevent "duplication", nothing in the guidelines, and nothing in the proactive moderation
HN is described as a news aggregator. It should be expected in a news aggregator, users may submit stories by different authors published at different URLs offering different coverage of the same news topics. If the site operator wanted to prevent this for some reason, it could. HN does not
It seems the algorithm actually promotes such stories. Hence this sub-thread
Discussion on HN is generally highly repetitive, unoriginal and filed with meme-like, and sometimes toxic, comments. Many folks complain about it, others might like
it. Every user is different. It's not for any one user to determine what any other user should or should not see; readers can make up their own minds
The majority of HN users do not participate in "discussion". They either read the stories and/or the replies. Some might only visit HN periodically. Perhaps they are not following HN discussions, they have no idea what has been discussed earlier and no time to find out or reason to care. The majority of HN stories have zero replies, i.e., no "discussion". It stands to reason that some users read the stories, i.e., the news, irrespective of "discussion". Upvotes on these stories are potential evidence; unless these users are just upvoting titles
Alleged "duplication" of discussion is irrelevant in these submissions because there is no discussion. Stories are not just "discussion topics". They are news, for readers who are interested in reading news
Finally, (real) duplicate URLs are commonly found in submissions that never get labeled "[dupe]". These are explicitly allowed on a discretionary basis. The "[dupe]" tag is inconsistently applied and cannot be relied on