I understand that cross posting is not always desirable, but it has it’s benefits also. You can find new communities, you can easily post a post which someone else posted into a more appropriate community where more people will be able to read it. For that it would be nice to consolidate cross posted posts in the view so they don’t show up over and over again but also have a way to cross post in a simpler way.
I don’t like the idea to combine the posts, I thought we basically already have this functionality for things which point to the same link:
My idea was very simple, if we have a list of articles from the database and we go through them to show them, instead of render a second one which is marked as a cross-post (either same link or some flag) then we show this icon in the first instance of it in the list.
Then you can click on this icon like now to show the instances of this cross posted post and they are still compleatly seperated in any other way other than in the listing.