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Comment by starball-tgz | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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.

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