[JimDabell]

> sometimes hearing the same answer, phrased or worded differently, makes all the difference in the world in understanding.

If you don't understand the answer, leave a comment asking for clarification.

> It doesn't hurt anything to answer a similar question again

Having people ask you the same questions over and over again who don't care at all about wasting your time drives away the people most able to answer questions.

It's happened time and time again with every type of developer discussion forum I've seen – either the rules are strict to encourage people to try their best and avoid wasting human effort, or the experienced developers eventually get fed up being treated like search engines and leave, resulting in a forum far less able to answer questions. I can't think of a place that's not ended up in one of these two situations.

[ProAm]

> If you don't understand the answer, leave a comment asking for clarification.

In SO this will get shot down and clarifications will get edited away. It's brutal there and not helpful. I firmly believe the benefit (since it is a QA site, or is it a lets re-write the manual site?) outweighs the detriment.

> Having people ask you the same questions over and over again who don't care at all about wasting your time drives away the people most able to answer questions.

Honestly a lot of the people that answer and moderate questions there are unfriendly, the snark is high, it might be good to get a new batch of answerers in there and have the old move on. Obviously my opinion.

[JimDabell]

> In SO this will get shot down and clarifications will get edited away.

I don't think I've seen that. Can you give an example?

[ProAm]

No, I've pretty much given up on SO, it's been years so there is evidence but I cant find it now easily. I believe you can the sentiment is true based on the number of other people with similar experiences on the site.

[JimDabell]

I don't think I've seen anybody say that comments asking for clarification on an answer get shot down, and I don't think I've seen anybody say that edits to clarify an answer get reverted either. That's why I asked.

[ProAm]

It's all good. My main point was that people learn in different manners. Sometimes people asking the question don't realize they are asking one that has already been asked. Sometimes they don't know what they don't know. So for them it might help seeing the two similar questions be answered similarly but not exactly the same.

The question begs who is SO trying to help? People who answer questions, people who ask questions, or SO so they can rewrite technical manuals?

[reitanqild]

> Having people ask you the same questions over and over again who don't care at all about wasting your time drives away the people most able to answer questions.

I see this mentioned a number of times but it seems nobody cares to do the obvious thing: impose a tiny tiny (e.g. $1 or wait n hours after creating your account) threshold to get the privilege of asking questions.

It is almost as if some people enjoy the current situation :-/

Furthermore the current situation has already driven off a number of contributors, not everyobe because they are bored but because they find it toxic.