[PeterStuer]

Please don't tell me you were one of those marking every SO question as duplicate, more often than not missing the entire nuance in the question that made it not a duplicate at all, and the answers to the so called previously asked question utterly unusable?

This was one of those infuriating things that drove so many away from SO and jump ship the second there was an alternative.

[antihipocrat]

I'm not sure why duplicates were ever considered an issue. For certain subjects (like JS) things evolved so quickly during the height of SO that even a year old answer was outdated.

That and search engines seemed to promote more recent content.. so an old answer sank under the ocean of blog spam

[ceejayoz]

SO wanted to avoid being a raw Q&A site in favor of something more like a wiki.

If a year-old answer on a canonical question is now incorrect, you edit it.

[PeterStuer]

But the answer has not become incorrect. It is still correct for that question in that specific context. More likely, the 'canonicalization process' was overly coarse (for SEO?), inconsistent and confused.

[MoreQARespect]

That's a valid goal, but they should have adapted the software to the community instead of trying to adapt the community to the software.

SO's biggest asset was its community and while they treated it with some respect in the beginning they took it for granted and trashed it later.

[ceejayoz]

I think this policy was, in large part, intended to respect the user base, who get exhausted answering the same question over and over.

I do agree they later trashed that relationship with the Monica incident and AI policies.

[PeterStuer]

Sounds like they optimised for a select 1% class of self appointed gatekeepers rather than the broad user base. Classic mistake of nearly every defunct social site.

[ceejayoz]

To a certain extent, you have to. Same reasons Wikipedia has a core clique of editors; they do a lot of the work.

It worked beautifully for quite a while. I don't think anyone anticipated ChatGPT when planning it all out.

[moi2388]

Then they should have made a wiki instead of a Q&A site

[ceejayoz]

They did, really. That's why I can edit anyone else's questions and answers.

[Frieren]

I was "playing" the gamification part of StackOverflow. I wanted to ask a good question for points. But it was very difficult because any meaningful question had already been asked. It was way easier to find questions to answer.

[ceejayoz]

Every time I ask people for an example of this, and get one, I agree with the duplicate determination. Sometimes it requires a little skimming of the canonical answers past just the #1 accepted one; sometimes there's a heavily upvoted clarification in a top comment, but it's usually pretty reasonable.