| > 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. |