we've to figure out a way to deal with the re-posts. -.- I really feel bad for downvoting a re-post because the user had no idea about it.(even though it's funny)

And new peeps will come and commit the same mistake of re-posting.

Doesn't anyone lurk anymore?

@g-m-f Exactly! Doesn't anyone lurk anymore? If they did, they probably would've seen them.

If I see the titanic CSS joke again I'm gonna cry.

...and the solving all your coding problems in your sleep... Yawn.

This is exactly what the repost downvote option is for... And unless a user receives a consistently excessive amount of them, they aren't penalized. All it does is hide the content from people who have selected to not see reposts. The threshold is very low for something to be marked as a repost.

@dfox it'd be great if we detect that it's a repost before itself. something like SO does for questions. I know it's be hard for a single person to do this,but we can always open-source it. what do you think?

there could be something like acomparison to posted pictures, or even an AI like Watson to tell if the image was already posted x-times and tells the user beforehand that it's a repost and he won't be able to post it

@valentindiehl exactly what I was saying.we can open-source this project and work on it!

It's not that simple. We don't want to completely eliminate reposts because the simple fact is a lot of users haven't seen that content yet and they like the content and share it. If reposts were so bad then they wouldn't do nearly as well as they do now.

The idea for what we're doing now is the people who want to see reposts can see them and the people that don't want to will see very few of them. I'm not convinced that stopping people from posting things that might have already been posted (and could have been months ago) is a good solution. I think it's perfectly fine not to want to see reposts, but that doesn't mean everyone shares the same feeling, and I can tell you, as a fact, many don't.

One thing that's been proposed is showing similar posts on the post screen, just as a heads up, but that still doesn't help make the old content that many enjoy more discoverable.

To add - I think it's a complex issue and I do believe the first steps we took (repost downvote) solve a big portion.

If you haven't used any other communities, you might not realize it, but this definitely isn't an issue unique to devRant. Imgur features many reposts on the front page (all voted there by users) and they haven't really done anything to stop it, and there's clearly a reason for that.

That's why I tend not to love the solutions that involve completely stopping reposts, and prefer the ones that involve not showing reposts to people who don't want to see them.