[fiskfiskfisk]

In my own experience it's not often the elected moderators that are the problem, but those with a golden tag in a specific tag. They're far too eager to close questions because they're the ones culling through a tag often - and then close the question as they quickly think "oh, it's that again".

But it often isn't, they just didn't spend enough time to see nuance.

And neither do they see that even if _they_ understand that the question linked to is the same thing, there is no way the asker can understand what the similarity is from their knowledge point of view (or why the linked duplicate question is the same question).

[esafak]

How do you think they should have handled closing questions, if at all?

[bombcar]

Why close questions? Is there a limit on storage space?

dang doesn't go and delete all the infinite failed submissions to HN, after all.

[shagie]

Should all 10,000 questions ( https://stackoverflow.com/questions/linked/218384?lq=1 ) that are duplicates of https://stackoverflow.com/questions/218384/what-is-a-nullpoi... be open and still allow people to try to answer each instance of the person's question?

[zahlman]

Heh, I hadn't realized the infamous null pointer/reference question was that well cited. The most egregious cases in the Python tag only have about 3500 (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/20109391) and 1500 (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1373164/) links respectively.

... Okay, I want to walk back something I said in some other comments here. There is definitely a class of SO questions that get closed as duplicates inappropriately. I tend to forget about the first of the questions because it's not generally a suitable dupe target when it's used: it's a meta question, explaining how to fix your question, rather than actually answering it. But, as you might infer, that means your question should still be closed - it lacks debugging details.

I fought against this trend on meta: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/426205 . Unfortunately, there's another incentive misalignment here: dupe-hammering the question allows users with a gold badge to act more quickly on questions that don't meet site standards but are likely to attract a quick answer that interferes with keeping the site clean.

The second one... honestly probably isn't the best version of the question, but it's attracted good answers and become "canonical". The problem is that thinking in terms of "variable variables" isn't necessarily the right way to think about the problem (dynamically modifying namespaces; or rather, the fact that Python's namespaces are reflected as objects that can in most cases be modified meaningfully) - but it does map pretty well to how a beginner would typically think about the problem. It just tends to overlap with other reasonable questions in a messy way.

On Codidact, I've attempted to address the problem space more proactively, but I think I didn't complete the project I had in mind.

[shagie]

https://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/262080/ has a data point in time when it could have been done...

> How much traffic do the questions that get duped to something bring? Especially the (currently) 410 questions linked to the Java NPE question. You get the couple of FGITW answers on it and the answer is over there, and closed to keep more people from trying to answer it (I hope the dup hammer is helping)... but now it's a closed question with 0 score, 100 views after a year... and five answers (one of which was accepted)... and no one will ever find it.

That was in 2014.

---

There are some misaligned incentives. There are probably people who dup vote to try to boost their reputation for some reason.

The problem (as I saw it) was that the tools of moderation and curation had too much friction and limits placed on them.

As the number of questions grew faster than the people who would curate them did, and the tools to curate them were diminished... you've got the problem of "there are two tools to curate and moderate left. One is to close the question. The other is to be a jerk to try to disincentivize the person from doing that again." I wrote about the second bit... a few years ago. Rudeness – the moderation tool of last resort -- https://shagie.net/2016/09/16/rudeness-the-moderation-tool-o...

Things like making it harder to not see low quality questions, or close them, or delete them...

> Thus rudeness and the attempt to drive an individual away because other moderation tools have run out or are ineffective. Rudeness is the moderation tool of last resort. When one sees the umteenth “how do I draw a pyramid with *” in the first week of classes on a programming site – how does one make it go away when the moderation tools have been fully exhausted? Be rude and hope that the next person seeing it won’t post the umteenth+1 one.

With respect to Stack Overflow, I believe that they've exhausted the people capable of doing moderating without rudeness and are now employees trying to moderate the core group rather than the core group empowered to moderate the site. Eventually, there will be no more left in the core group.

Other sites, with a narrower focus (e.g. GitHub discussions) are more able to handle the better focused questions and smaller user bases.

[zahlman]

> Why close questions?

Because we're trying to build a searchable reference, such that if you try to look for an existing question, you a) find it; b) find the right question; c) find the best possible version of that question; d) can readily tell that you found what you want.

And because we are explicitly not trying to build a discussion forum, social media, "HN but specifically for programming questions", or anything else like that.

You might as well ask: why delete newly created pages on Wikipedia, or revert edits to existing pages?

[paulryanrogers]

Perhaps duplicates could be classified as useful (therefore SEO indexed and pointing to original) or noise (not indexable)

[zahlman]

> In my own experience it's not often the elected moderators that are the problem, but those with a golden tag in a specific tag. They're far too eager to close questions because they're the ones culling through a tag often - and then close the question as they quickly think "oh, it's that again".

> But it often isn't, they just didn't spend enough time to see nuance.

As a gold badge holder (for Python and a few other things), I see this complaint constantly. 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. This entails collecting useful answers together so that people with fundamentally the same question can all find them, instead of it depending on how lucky their search engine of choice is feeling today.

The meta site has historically been flooded with people trying to reopen blatant duplicates based on trivial distinctions, at the level of "no, I want to get the Nth item of a list, not a tuple". That isn't a direct quote, but it's not an exaggeration either. I wish it were.

We do make mistakes, in part because there's pressure to act quickly. It's much harder to keep the site clean when answers get posted where they shouldn't be. Closing questions prevents answers from coming in.

> there is no way the asker can understand what the similarity is from their knowledge point of view (or why the linked duplicate question is the same question).

I try to leave a comment to explain the connection when it isn't obvious. (Another common thing that happens is that the problem someone wants to solve involves an obvious two- or three-step procedure, and each step is a matter of fundamental technique that's already been explained countless times.) But overall, it isn't our goal to teach. We answer very simple questions, and very difficult questions; but we aren't designed to teach. Sometimes it's hard to ask a simple question, because you have to figure out what the question is first. It's unfortunate that people who need the question answered often don't have that skill. But if we have a high quality version of that question already, we can direct people there.

Sometimes the linked duplicate isn't the best choice. You can help by finding and promoting a better choice - on the meta site and in the chat rooms. You can also help by editing common duplicate targets - both questions and answers - so that it becomes more clear to people who would actually have the question, that they're in the right place (and so that the information in answers is more readily applicable to them).

[moring]

> 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

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.

To emphasize the difference: Personalized answers would be about having a single question and giving different answers to different audiences. This is not at all the same as having two different _questions_.

[zahlman]

>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).

[moring]

> 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.

[zahlman]

> 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.