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Comment by azeirah | Hacker News Reader

I wonder whether instead of closing topics as "off-topic", "duplicate" or "whatever", which can obviously be perceived as negative to someone, might it be a better alternative to do the opposite? Instead of blacklisting "bad" questions as "off-topic", how about whitelisting "good" questions?

If Stackoverflow wants to build this library, let mods and enthusiasts decide whether a question is worth indexing, and let the questions that would otherwise be closed as duplicate or off-topic be as they are. Perhaps replace "duplicate" with "related to indexed question #XXXXXX"?

It would certainly take a while to restructure SO like this, but with enough effort and time, lower-quality questions simply won't show up in searches unless there really isn't a better related question available.

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This is a really good point - people seem to get hung up about questions being closed, even though "closed as duplicate" is a win since it means somebody already answered your question. If you just called it "promoted to FAQ" or something...

> even though "closed as duplicate" is a win since it means somebody already answered your question.

That's only a win if the duplicate is real. Sometimes questions are closed when they aren't really duplicates.

Yes that is bad. You can vote to reopen if you have enough rep.

> if you have enough rep.

This is a substantial part of the fighting over the site, though - there are lengthy guides to picking up enough Stack Overflow rep to render the site usable.

I usually see this dismissed with "just help some people and ask some good questions, you'll be there in no time", but when I talk to friends who are getting a self-taught start with programming, I consistently hear a different story. They're getting questions closed as dupes, either because they aren't experienced enough to recognize duplicate questions with different terms or because mods are squelching their genuinely novel questions. And they're new, so they can't answer hard questions - and the easy ones don't produce rep because they're inevitably closed, removing all the payouts for answering them.

I understand the logic behind the rep gating system, it's not a bad idea. But it's just fuel on the fire when things go wrong, and they go wrong a lot in the form of wrongly closed questions.

Yes it is hard to ask good questions, especially when you are just starting with a technology and lack the proper terminology and mental model - which is the phase where you need to ask the most questions!

Yeah - I don't mean to imply this is all Stack Overflow's problem! I think more could be done, but the 'unknown unknowns' situations is really hard to provide support for with anything short of sitting down one-on-one and working through the topic.

They changed "closed" to refer instead to "on hold" and IMO it did not make a big difference.

> If you just called it "promoted to FAQ" or something...

In all but one of the cases where I've had questions closed as duplicates, I would have found this actively insulting. That's because all but one of those closures linked to non-duplicates, and in some cases to questions I had already singled out as not applying to my situation.

It's honestly a pretty hard to solve problem, because you're trapped by opposing forces. The sunnier the framing, the less it will sting the people asking the (numerous) duplicate questions - but the more it will irritate people who think (rightly or wrongly) that it's been done in error.

My SO experience seems to have been nonstandard, but it's always looked to me like changing labels and appearances is going to go bust because the rate of actual bad decisions and meanness by power users is too high to build trust.

I believe the reason people get hung up on that is because, many times, the "duplicate" isn't actually a duplicate.

Can you provide a few links to examples? I will vote to reopen if appropriate.

Good point. I think there's real value in replacing even just the verbiage of "Closed as duplicate" with something like a "Related Questions" section. It would remove a lot of the hostility, intentional or not, felt by newcomers making their inevitable mistakes, which goes right to the heart of one of the major goals Joel mentioned in the article.

I'd take that a step further, in that adding a link to a related (or even duplicate) question shouldn't _close_ that question, it should be a potentially valid answer to this person's question.

If enough people upvote the link to the originally posted question, or even if it gets selected as the answer, then SO can simply _not index_ this question. But the poster doesn't feel rejected, and can in fact choose to continue engaging in his question in cases where it's subtly different.

That's a great point. The community votes on whether an answer is helpful, so why not vote on whether a related question is actually related?

It does work like that to some extent, since closing as a duplicate require a certain number of votes. But this could probably be improved as per the suggestion, as it seems many people have experienced inappropriate "closed as duplicate". It seems to be one of the major complaints in this thread.

Sometimes the duplicate is blatant, but in many case it is really a judgment call. In my experience I more often vote for "reopen" than for "close", so there are definitely different attitudes to what is considered a duplicate.

Alternatively, it could be the decision of the one asking the question. Just as they select the "accepted" answer, they could choose to accept or reject the duplicate as appropriate.

There's already related questions on the side.

Here's something I've never really understood: What is the downside to leaving the question up, even if it is an actual duplicate? Instead of "closing as duplicate", just answer it with a link to what you feel is the question it duplicates. If that works, then the original will score higher on Google, and if it turns out it's not a duplicate, the asker is able to provide more information as to why that answer doesn't work for them.

They actually do that, too, at least for some period of time. I've searched for a particular question, had a SO result pop up as a result, then clicked on it to find it has a header that says, "This is a dupe of question xyz" with a link to the original. The dupe is still up and may still have answers. So it seems to me that they already do this.

They only close for writing answers to the question, the question (and answers written before it was closed) is still up with a link to the duplicate.

The asker can edit the question to provide more information and the question can be nominated for reopening. It only requires 5 votes to reopen, IIRC.

But why? What's the point of all those hoops, other than to discourage new users?

Well if the question is a legitimate duplicate then it is clearly a win for everyone, not least the one asking the question, since now you have a link to answers to your problem which have already been written. Which means now your problem is solved.

I think this is a good idea.

Specifically what I found upsetting its that it stopped being possible to help people with bad English or those that struggled to express themselves. On numerous occasions I'd finally extract meaning from their mis-phrased question, tap out a considered response only to be prevented from posting it because the question was now closed.

That experience was exceptionally frustrating and a downgrade from newsgroups.

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