I made a mockup of two possible methods for dealing with multiple, often over-the-top, submissions on popular topics (Color funding, Apple TOS changes, etc). These tweaks don't address quality of comments or submissions directly, but would leave room for different submissions and mitigate the need for critical comments about poor titles and duplicate submissions.<p>Alternative titles:
Users can submit an alternative title for a submission. If the alternative title gets more than X percent of submission's overall score it becomes the new title.<p>Merge requests:
Users can submit a merge request by providing another submission ID or URL to merge with. Merge requests show on both posts. If the merge request's score becomes more than X percent of the lower-scoring submission's score, then the lower submission is merged into the higher-scoring one, maybe with small markers on merged-in comments to show that they were merged in, just in case the two submissions had a slightly different focus.<p>Mockup: http://min.us/lmLZve