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.