I'd love to see merging of discussions. RiderOfGiraffe's bot was nice. But the hive mind didn't like it.

Upvoted. If not 'merge' (hard), at least detect the duplicate and automatically add links to the previous discussions and save @RiderOfGiraffes from doing it manually. :)

I have a robot that used to do that, but it provoked an extremely strong negative reaction from a sizeable proportion of the community. I discontinued its use, and after some of the comments, I'm reluctant to bring it back.

Doing it in the comments with a bot.. yeah, I can see why that might've struck a nerve.

But it's the old usenet problem. FAQs I don't think would work here though.

I was thinking more as a collapsable "see also" section added only to duplicate articles.

Update Added reference to usenet.

It sounds useful, but I fear that new comments would be buried in the old comments, particularly if old comments retained their points in determining the ranking.

Even if it didn't merge the discussions having some automatic indicator of 'Related Discussions' ala Reddit would be fantastic.