If [like I do], you browse HN by the "new" section, you'll see this time after time after time after time...
I don't know what's to be done about it. HN don't seem to care and it seems like a huge number of visitors to the site just can't be bothered spending a few seconds to check whether or not a story has already been submitted, before adding their own noise to the signal.
From the website management point of view one difficulty is that; on the intarwebs in general, the vast majority of these stories originate from a single news agency or press release and are then mirrored across countless other 'news' sites. So, in effect the problem increases exponentially: one story source is republished across 20 different websites and then each of those 20 website articles is submitted to HN by 20 different people.
And yes, I'm aware of the problems you cite, and I'm explicitly suggesting a measure that could be taken to help fix what I see, and you acknowledge, is an irritation.
I know some people's online comments are pretty toxic, but I'm struggling to think of a scenario whereby a Twitter stream or Facebook timeline could be used to make a 'dirty bomb' --and I'm not having much luck.
There's also a delicious irony in the fact the border agents would no doubt claim not to be stealing your data, but merely making a copy of it --while at the same time the US is extraditing people from around the world, to charge them with piracy, for copying music and movie files. In which case, it seems, copying data is theft.
All I see is a suspicious number of repeated submissions on HN, coinciding with pretty much the same recycled press release disguised as a news item, cropping up on a few tech sites.
I strongly suspect this supposed sudden "popularity" of Mastodon is nowt but the result of an ongoing viral marketing campaign.
