tl,dr; I think that it is worth Steemit adding functionality similar to what Stack Overflow has for 'suggesting' that a similar post already exists at creation time. I would also like to see related articles suggested whilst reading content in order to find other, similar posts which I might enjoy.
Perhaps the incentive of potentially getting paid for submitting a new Post / Story (the terminology here should probably also be cleared up - between "Submitting a Story" and voting on a "Post") is driving a culture of post first - search later (a recent example of this is the post asking about how to mine Steem which I helped answer). I think that the website could help do some of the heavy lifting of searching the existing content for a user when they are creating a new post - to see if anything similar already exists. Stack Overflow is a great example of a website that provides a prompt that your question has already been asked in order to cut down on duplicate content. Steemit has become a popular place to add content and we are starting to see more and more duplication.
I'm a firm believer that it is better to treat the cause and not the symptoms; that it would be better through education / information to have fewer duplicate posts than to rely solely on the community to moderate them away.
There are many posts on Steemit which are related - either by the same user or provide another view point on the same topic; the opinions on the what the effect of the 4th July payout would have on the community as a whole and the price of Steem is a good example. It would be nice to see suggestions of what other related articles you might want to read based on the one that you are currently viewing; similar to how Amazon suggests what other people who bought a product viewed or went on to buy etc.
In summary, I think that it would be great if Steemit was to add suggestions about similar content for the following two reasons
- Reduce the amount of duplicate posts / questions at creation time to help with moderation.
- Similar articles could be displayed whilst reading content to help link to content which might also be of interest to the reader .
I believe that this functionality would be very useful in helping the website's readership and the community to continue to grow.
Maybe index all content into a Lucene index (either using Solr or Elasticsearch) and when someone has written a post do a "more like this" query to find out if there are any highly similar posts. (that would need to be tuned carefully to actually bring back similar things) Also, when searching, instead of using this google site search, using Solr or Elasticsearch. Write a relevancy boosting function to take into account the date it was published, favouring initial posts on the subject (maybe?) as well as taking in to account the popularity of the post in the relevancy boosting function.
Some ideas from someone working on search.
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