Outside of bandwidth concerns, I believe that the greater "transformation" via replies the more important the article. That is effectively the purpose of FR: to comment upon the news.
I would suggest to label duplicate posts "parallel posts" and freely link them to each other, which would effectively create a single, more largely "transformed" original post.
I don't mean to encourage parallel posts, but neither do I condemn the practice. I tend to see original, informative, and imperative replies to each of the twins (or more).
Heh. " Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln,
how was the play?"