News.yc is, among other things, an educational resource -- and teaching is about saying the same things over and over and over, to a new group of students each time. That's how it works.
If you want to read a site where "we've already discussed that, so you can't publish it again" is a valid criticism, you need to switch to reading scientific journals. I don't think that the alternative -- trying to turn news.yc into a site that behaves like a scientific journal -- is going to fly. We don't have a required curriculum that prospective upmodders must read. We don't make them pass an entrance exam. They're allowed to just turn up and vote. That's how this system works.
On this and other sites, I've always craved a moderation system whereby I could nominate a certain collection of modders whose votes I trust above others. For example, if I could click a button and see what news.yc would look like if only the YC class of 2007 were allowed to vote, I might be able to filter out the articles which were of interest only to freshmen in CS. Unfortunately, I've never really seen such a thing. Obviously, allowing an arbitrary set of such queries would risk creating a huge scaling problem, but you'd think that a site could offer a choice of two or three ways to weight the moderations. You could divide the incoming readers into "cohorts" based on year of arrival (or even other demographic information) and offer options for reading social news within your own cohort.
If you want to read a site where "we've already discussed that, so you can't publish it again" is a valid criticism, you need to switch to reading scientific journals. I don't think that the alternative -- trying to turn news.yc into a site that behaves like a scientific journal -- is going to fly. We don't have a required curriculum that prospective upmodders must read. We don't make them pass an entrance exam. They're allowed to just turn up and vote. That's how this system works.
On this and other sites, I've always craved a moderation system whereby I could nominate a certain collection of modders whose votes I trust above others. For example, if I could click a button and see what news.yc would look like if only the YC class of 2007 were allowed to vote, I might be able to filter out the articles which were of interest only to freshmen in CS. Unfortunately, I've never really seen such a thing. Obviously, allowing an arbitrary set of such queries would risk creating a huge scaling problem, but you'd think that a site could offer a choice of two or three ways to weight the moderations. You could divide the incoming readers into "cohorts" based on year of arrival (or even other demographic information) and offer options for reading social news within your own cohort.