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I’ve never had much of a problem. However, I occasionally find a question that matches my problem exactly, but closed as a duplicate with a link to a question that’s similar, but not the same :-(

> so I asked in Meta how I can find out who closed my question, because I wanted to explain to them why it's not a duplicate.

you're supposed to edit your post to explain why it's not a duplicate (and actually, before you post, you're supposed to search for existing Q&A, and when you post, to show what you have researched). In the duplicate closure notice, there's a big button suggesting you to edit your post if it's not a duplicate.

> And because of that people use alt accounts to farm points. They use other accounts to ask questions, and answer them with their main account.

This is called fraud and it's not allowed and seriously looked down upon by the community. The system has mechanisms in place to auto-detect fraud and ding people for it.

Nah doesn't work. I've had the same thing. I've even linked the similar question in the original, saying how I needed more. Editing the post doesn't bring it back to life. It stays dead. Like pulling the knife out of a stabbed corpse. They are still dead.

I've seen it a pile of times.

Back in the day, questions were all valid. It was the way devs should work. If you posted an identical question, so what? Who did it hurt?

This "fraud" is totally allowed. Who looks down on it? I could give a snot about my points. If someone wants to have 10 million "magic points" I don't care. Every dev I know, with 20+ years in has about the same < 5k points. We don't care.

I gave one dev 2k points for answering a single question.

Posting duplicate questions hurts the community. The whole idea is to have one answer for one question. If the answer changes over time it is updated. This does not work if there are 500 identical questions.

SO is not your personal helpdesk. It is a Q&A site. If a question has been asked and answered it is up to you to find it and use it, you don't just ask the same question again when people have already taken the time to write a good answer. That would defy the entire point. Maybe you should try asking on Reddit or a Discord server or some other community more appropriate for the kind of interaction you seem to want.

There are so many nuance to a problem that the approach of "one question - one answer" is simply naïve.

Even if we wanted to go with this approach, questions that are potential duplicate should just have an answer pointing to the other question and let the OP decide if it's right or not.

Having someone else that doesn't have the full vision on the question and context is not the right approach.

You can't let the OP decide if their question is good. Every OP thinks their question is good and most of them are idiots. I guarantee you most of the people complaining about SO do so because they suck at asking questions.

As someone with a 9-year-old account on SO, I have never asked a question there because I didn't fancy the chance of it being immediately shut down.

From personal experience, I have come across numerous questions that appeared to address the exact issue I was struggling with, only to find them closed as duplicates, off-topic, or something similar. Often, the suggested alternative Q&As are unrelated except for the surface-level similarity, which is especially frustrating.

Sometimes, when I find one of these closed questions, I feel a strong sense of empathy towards the asker, as if I'm the only person out there who understands them.

Unfortunately, I have always been primarily occupied with whatever problems I was dealing with at the time, so I don't have a list of examples I can share with you.

SO is undoubtedly a valuable resource, and I don't completely disagree with the moderation style. However, it has been a slow burn for me.

I don't doubt that this happens. Mods are people and people make mistakes.

Though i also think it is in part that the Asker doesn't understand how to apply the answer to their issue rather than the answer not being relevant. In my experience a lot of people are unwilling or incapable of adapting an answer to their situation, which can be problematic in a place like SO that doesn't attempt to cater directly to individuals like that but rather to answer more generally.

I think issues like this contribute a lot to the dissatisfaction we see surrounding SO.

> and most of them are idiots

Change the word most for some and you get a statement that also applies to mods.

I like to check SO for problems I encounter but no way I would ask a question in there. Really don't like the toxic climate.

I decide on my own in a way like: read a ton of similar questions and their answers (if they have some) and rtfm to fix the problem. Or simply ask my friends.

If you must you can imply that SO is not ones friend. At least for me this holds.

> There are so many nuance to a problem that the approach of "one question - one answer" is simply naïve.

Yet I have marked hundreds of questions as duplicate which was often welcomed by the person who asked the question, so clearly it's not fundamentally broken, even though there is some friction at times.

I've had two questions closed as duplicates--both involved situations where how I asked the question didn't remotely look like the duplicate question (no way I would have found it by searching) but it actually had the same answer.

> Posting duplicate questions hurts the community. The whole idea is to have one answer for one question. If the answer changes over time it is updated. This does not work if there are 500 identical questions.

And what about when the nuance of the question changes, supporting points are different because tech has changed, so the original question is no longer accurate even though it's the same problem?

If you want to have this discussion you're going to have to provide a concrete example.

IMO it's kind of strange to want evidence for something that can very clearly occur. Do you really deny that it happens? As it is though I don't have any examples handy, maybe someone else will be able to provide one for you.

If you show an example i can either try to explain why it is the way it is or i can agree with you that it is unreasonable.

I can not say anything useful about a hypothetical scenario you make up. Maybe it happens, maybe it doesn't, we don't know.

> Nah doesn't work. I've had the same thing. I've even linked the similar question in the original, saying how I needed more. Editing the post doesn't bring it back to life. It stays dead. Like pulling the knife out of a stabbed corpse. They are still dead.

The only way I've found around this is to wait 10 hours or so and repost, hoping the original people who had an issue are now sleeping.

> Back in the day, questions were all valid. It was the way devs should work. If you posted an identical question, so what? Who did it hurt?

That was never the case; duplicates were around back in the day as well.

The idea is to build a long-term repository of useful questions, and millions of duplicate questions if not helpful for that. If I answered question X with great detail and lots of context then I really don't want to do that every month, so, you mark it as a duplicate, and in principle everyone wins with this.

I'm not saying the process always works brilliantly in practice and I agree there are too many curmudgeons around and that sometimes questions get closed as duplicates too fast, but the basic idea of it is fine.

This edit feature might be a privilege of some sorts. I have a decent amount but when they closed my question as a duplicate I was not able to edit the question.

I don't know why they are they doing it, clearly posting a reference to another question entirely. Why not just let the question hang, it feels almost bot-like behaviour.

> SO gives people with points the power to bully others. When you protest you get collectively downvoted to the point that you a temporary banned, for asking a valid question.

If this happens, there is no way to recover. That question is forever blacklisted, not just closed. No one could ever ask it again. For a particularly long term problem I was having, I asked for a friend to repost it with his account. He wrote up the question, the verbiage wasn't mine (let along copypasta). I'm not sure what gave it away, but his version got -4 within an hour.

There are no effective appeals, no oversight, no reform possible.

And, if we evaluate it honestly what they've strived for the last couple of years, they don't even want the site to be a place for people like us to ask questions or answer them. They see it as some Wikipedia-like encyclopedia of "good questions". If your question isn't a good question, it does not matter that you need answers. It doesn't matter that other people out there have the same sort of question.

It's just not something they want.

Does anyone remember back in 2007 or so when we were all excited that now every link wasn't Expert Sexchange, and we thought the internet and the world were slowly being improved?

> They see it as some Wikipedia-like encyclopedia of "good questions". If your question isn't a good question, it does not matter that you need answers.

An encyclopedia of good questions is a very valuable thing. SO was created with the goal of it scaling, because once you answer the good questions, nobody needs to ask anything anymore.

Then they decided to write a formal specification for "good question". This is when things started to break.

Yep. 100%. Before good questions would be upvoted. Bad questions would be down voted. Get to zero and the question remained. The dev could revive it with a few up votes.

The problem is the gate keepers, seem to hover over the questions queue. I shudder to think how someone who has english as a second language would fair.

Noobs don't know how to form questions. That's what we're supposed to be here for. To help them learn answers, and how to ask better questions.

> The problem is the gate keepers, seem to hover over the questions queue.

I would encourage you to look at https://stackoverflow.com/review and the participation in those queues.

If you believe that people are gatekeeping those queues and preventing good questions from getting out, help out in the queues and work to fix up the questions too.

As moderators are on strike and things are not going through the queues, this would be an opportunity to help out the rest of the community.

I will point out that typically the queues have orders of magnitude more things needing than people can do in a day - individuals are limited to how many reviews they can do in a day so that they don't burn out or get in the habit of hitting the same button again and again.

> because once you answer the good questions, nobody needs to ask anything anymore.

If that's your belief, then nothing I could say will ever convert you away from such a peculiar religion.

(For everyone else) Not only will many need to ask questions still, but the "encyclopedia of good questions" is rather useless to many of us. Some small fraction of our needs is about a classic textbook example like out of some intro class. We live in the real world.

The "encyclopedia of good questions" has more to do about soothing the egos of jackasses who are (somehow) ashamed of the great thing they accidentally created.

That's my impression exactly. I was thinking "junior high" rather than "3rd grade" but yeah.

Hollywood could get a good script for a sequel to Mean Girls just by watching those people.

I mean, maybe the original post was an emotional exaggeration, but the systems designed like Stack Overflow where the vendor out sources their day-to-day operations to the member of the public (free-to-join for all) are prone to this kind of vulnerabilities.

The main problem is, without strong oversight, interest group starts to develop and then you got a Cambrian Explosion of motives. And as result of that, fragmentation of experience starts to happen (and maybe even corruption???).

Maybe a centralized management style is better for some of these services. At least so the users can directly talk to someone who's contractually responsible to serve them, instead of to another user from the public who is privileged but unpaid.

This is why a major value prop for ChatGPT is it's like Stack Overflow but it will always be nice to you :)

ChatGPT is mostly wrong though, so not helpful if you actually want to solve a problem. It's entertaining though

This is not true. I've been building a site with Sveltekit and Appwrite for fun. I know nothing about these technologies. ChatGPT has saved me hours of messing around and I haven't needed SO once. It doesn't always give me the best answer first, sure. It's an iterative process, which all software development is anyway.

> ChatGPT is mostly wrong though

Just like SO then

That is mostly correct but thing is, if you go on stackoverflow or chatGPT to have someone else write the solution for you, that's on you to use the wrong solution.

I've used chatGPT (as well as SO as many others) but always in the context of having enough knowledge (either from experience or experimenting before opening a question) to understand if the answers were just wrong or not.

To each their own but I treat ChatGPT as a rubber duck 2.0 and I think that's what it excel at.

This is why AI is going to take over the world in the future. Why bother hanging around real humans, who are frequently assholes, when you can hang around AIs that are always courteous and helpful? And once they develop AI-driven companion robots that look and feel mostly human, romantic relationships between humans will be gone: why bother risking a toxic relationship when you can spend your time with an AI that's always nice to you?