Comment by zahlman | Hacker News Reader

Comment by zahlman | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

>This is a strawman. Marking two different questions as duplicates of each other has nothing to do with a personalized answer, and answering both would absolutely be useful to everyone because a subset of visitors will look for answers to one question, and another subset will be looking for answers to the other question.

What you're missing: when a question is closed as a duplicate, the link to the duplicate target is automatically put at the top; furthermore, if there are no answers to the current question, logged-out users are automatically redirected to the target.

The goal of closing duplicates promptly is to prevent them from being answered and enable that redirect. As a result, people who search for the question and find a duplicate, actually find the target instead.

It's important here to keep in mind that the site's own search doesn't work very well, and external search doesn't understand the site's voting system. It happens all the time that poorly asked, hard-to-understand versions of a question nevertheless accidentally have better SEO. I know this because of years of experience trying to use external search to find a duplicate target for the N+1th iteration of the same basic question.

It is, in the common case, about personalized answers when people reject duplicates - because objectively the answers on the target answer their question and the OP is generally either refusing to accept this fact, refusing to accept that closing duplicates is part of our policy, or else is struggling to connect the answer to the question because of a failure to do the expected investigative work first (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/261592).

> The goal of closing duplicates promptly is to prevent them from being answered and enable that redirect. As a result, people who search for the question and find a duplicate, actually find the target instead.

Why would you want to prevent answers to a question, just because another unrelated question exists? Remember that the whole thread is not about actual duplicates, but about unrelated questions falsely marked as duplicates.

> ... because objectively the answers on the target answer their question ... > ... because of a failure to do the expected investigative work first ...

Almost everybody describing their experience with duplicates in this comment section tells the story of questions for which other questions have been found, linked from the supposedly-duplicate question, and described why the answers to that other question do NOT answer their own question.

The expected investigative work HAS been done; they explained why the other question is NOT a duplicate. The key point is that all of this has been ignored by the person closing the question.

> Why would you want to prevent answers to a question, just because another unrelated question exists? Remember that the whole thread is not about actual duplicates, but about unrelated questions falsely marked as duplicates.

Here, for reference, is the entire sentence which kicked off the subthread where you objected to what I was saying:

> It is without merit ~90% of the time. The simple fact is that the "nuance" seen by the person asking the question is just not relevant to us, because the point of the site is not to give you a personalized answer, but to build a reference where the questions are useful to everyone.

In other words: I am defending "preventing answers to the question" for the exact reason that it probably actually really is a duplicate, according to how we view duplicates. As a reminder, this is in terms of what future users of the site will find the most useful. It is not simply in terms of what the question author thinks.

And in my years-long experience seeing appeals, in a large majority of cases it really is a duplicate; it really is clearly a duplicate; and the only apparent reason the OP is objecting is because it takes additional effort to adapt the answers to the exact situation motivating the original question. And I absolutely have seen this sort of "effort" boil down to things like a need to rename the variables instead of just literally copying and pasting the code. Quite often.

> Almost everybody describing their experience with duplicates in this comment section tells the story of questions for which other questions have been found, linked from the supposedly-duplicate question, and described why the answers to that other question do NOT answer their own question.

No, they do not. They describe the experience of believing that the other question is different. They don't even mention the answers on the other question. And there is nowhere near enough detail in the description to evaluate the reasoning out of context.

This is, as I described in other comments, why there is a meta site.

And this is HN. The average result elsewhere on the Internet has been worse.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com