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Comment by protonimitate | Hacker News Reader

Glad to see an active approach is being taken. SO is a great resource and contains some of the best information on the web IRT programming.

If there was only one thing I could change it would be this: If someone marks a question as duplicate, and closes, make them provide a link to the 'original' question and a brief summary as to why it is a duplicate.

Closing something as duplicate and then forcing the user who submitted the question to do more digging comes off as hostile, lazy, and even condescending. Sometimes the original question is lazy and un-researched, but in most cases it is hard to find the right search term for the problem you have.

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This! I have had several instances where some petty tyrant decided my question was a duplicate without providing proof. I questioned it and was given some snarky answer with a question number that was obviously dug up after my response. Looking at that question, it was clear that it was nothing like mine. On other occasions, when a link was provided, if you squinted, you might see the relationship but, for the life of me, I could not come up with a query based on my post that would cause the referenced link to come up. All this leads me to believe there are moderators out the, waiting for new questions that they can respond to first, whether or not they offer worthwhile advice.

I've seen questions closed as duplicates just because the answers are the same. That's insane.

StackOverflow is good if you come there via a search.

Otherwise, in my experience, it is utterly worthless for getting actual answers.

For instance, I've asked a total of 4 questions on the DBA Stack Exchange. Almost all of them were specific but easily generalized, weren't answered anywhere else. Three of them would have been easily answered by someone with good knowledge of the relevant products. (The other was only answered by significant trial and error.) On three of them, I was the only person to answer. Each of those took hours of research. On the fourth, someone else answered, but didn't appear to actually understand the question.

On StackOverflow itself, I've asked a single question. A moderator told me to do what I explicitly stated in the question I didn't want to do, and closed it as a duplicate.

The bounties are equally useless: earlier today I sacrificed 90% of my DBA reputation to get around 6 more views on my question. I'm pretty sure most of the views I got are from me refreshing the question.

Agreed. Great if your question has already been answered, but it's less than useless if you have a question - it's actually counter productive and a waste of time. I'd given up on questions until seeing this post featured today, so I decided to ask my 3rd question in 7 years (SO). It was down voted within 5 minutes and no idea why. I'll just roll my own solution based on my own suggestion.

Have you wondered why there are questions being upvoted just for a minute?

EDIT: A moderator helped me out on that last question, and refunded my reputation to let me ask a new, better-worded, question with a bounty. Thanks to that moderator.

Similarly I've had my questions being down-voted with no explanation. Or worse closed as "not a valid question" for no good reason.

The article suggests that the problem is that SO is too cruel to new clueless users. This isn't how it seems to me. Perfectly valid content gets down voted or closed.

That feels like it happens everywhere on the internet. Even here on HN, where you need a significant amount of "points" to downvote comments, you can still just get randomly down voted to oblivion based on a group of people just not agreeing with your content. Sometimes there just isn't rhyme or reason.

Actually, if you browse up to the top, it tells you what question it's a duplicate of. But even I was thrown off a few days ago, when I couldn't find that link after a question I answered was marked as duplicate. It's just bad UX, I suppose.

And even before that, when people are still voting, it automatically adds a comment on the question with the same link.

The only way to close something as a duplicate is to provide a link to the duplicate. Plus I think each close as duplicate adds a 'Possible duplicate of <xxx>' comment to the question.

My favorite is when I do the digging, find a similar answer that misses a key nuance, link to it to help explain the difference, and then get marked as a duplicate to the question that I am saying is different with no explanation.

SO is a killer resource for me as a new-ish coder but man, there's an uphill climb before you can avoid making people mad while using it.

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