[gyan]

> But if you had a personal experience, it will be easier to look within your questions on your profile page.

I answer Qs on this topic, not post them.

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Here's an example I found:

https://superuser.com/questions/1929615/ (the canonical q is about extracting as mono, the closed q is about muting one channel)

[zahlman]

You appear to have linked the canonical, which has a few duplicates marked. All are asking about isolating one channel, as far as I can tell. This canonical is literally titled "ffmpeg: isolate one audio channel". One of them also asks about "downmixing" to mono after isolating the channel (which I guess means marking the audio format as mono so that that isolated channel will play on both speakers), but that is trivial. And you see the same basic techniques offered in the answers: to use `-map-channel` or the `pan` audio filter. The other one explicitly wants a panned result, i.e. still stereo but only on one side; the logic for this is clear from the explanation in the canonical answer.

The point is to show the technique, not to meet individual exact needs. Stack Overflow doesn't need separate "how do I get the second line of a file?" and "how do I get the third line of a file?" questions.

[gyan]

The dupe is what I linked. The orig is https://superuser.com/questions/601972

The orig wants a mono output with one of the original channels as signal source. This involves downmixing i.e. rematrixing the audio.

The dupe want to just mute one of the channels, not repan it. One can't apply map_channel to do what the dupe wants.

One can use a couple of methods to achieve the dupe, including pan. But the syntax of pan needed for the dupe case is not the same as the orig, or deducible from it. They need to consult the docs (fortuitously, the dupe case is an illustrated example) or get a direct answer. The 'technique' shown in the orig is not intuitively adaptable to the dupe - one needs to know about the implicit muting that pan applies, which is not documented or evident in the orig answer. So it's not a duplicate of the source Q.

[zahlman]

> The dupe is what I linked. The orig is

Ah, I don't actually have a SuperUser account, so it was automatically redirecting me.

> The 'technique' shown in the orig is not intuitively adaptable to the dupe

IDK, it looks to me like I could figure it out pretty easily from what's written there, and I'm not by any means an ffmpeg expert.

[josephg]

> it looks to me like I could figure it out pretty easily from what's written there

Really? Wanna give it a try then, without looking up any other documentation? I've used ffmpeg plenty of times, but it doesn't seem obvious to me how I'd mute one audio channel.

From your other comments it sounds like you believe SO should have less content. Why? How would SO be improved by forcing people to figure something like this out from the existing answer? I just don't understand the benefit to having that question marked as a duplicate and deleted.

I've long wondered the same thing about wikipedia. Why does wikipedia delete well written pages about obscure topics? Is their hard disk full? Does every page cost them money? Does google search struggle at scale? I don't understand the benefit to deleting good content.

[JazCE]

> Really? Wanna give it a try then, without looking up any other documentation?

I mean, that's not the point of SO or any of the SE sites. It's not there so you don't have to do some more work to get to an answer.

From that answer, if you're still having issues, you form a question around:

"I found this answer on [SO](link), which lead me in this direction and found these [documents](link), however I am still having issues with getting the thing to work correctly when i run this bit of code, ```code```, from the output it says it's doing this or that, but when i check something, i find that it's not doing what it claims in the outputs. What might I have missed?"

And even then, that's still a fairly shaky question.

Most people don't know how to write questions, which is most of what this whole comment section is complaining about.

[josephg]

> that's not the point of SO or any of the SE sites. It's not there so you don't have to do some more work to get to an answer.

My brain is spitting out a parse error on this sentence. Too many double negatives.

Zahlman was claiming above that the "duplicate" question linked earlier in the thread wasn't a useful question. Its not useful because if you read the accepted answer in the original thread, you can figure it out easily.

Prove it then. Figure it out easily for us.

I think the point of SO is for people to look up the answers to questions they have. If people have similar but distinct questions with different answers, it seems objectively better to surface both SO threads. Ideally they'd be linked together so if I accidentally stumble on the wrong question, there's a link to the question I'm actually interested in.

> "I found this answer on [SO](link)

Why bother with all of that? I mean, it sounds like all those extra words are all to grovel sufficiently to the SO moderator-gods, hoping in their capricious anger they won't mark your question as a duplicate and wipe it from the internet. Grovelling doesn't help the question asker or the question answerer.

As a user, my problem with SO isn't that people ask bad questions. Its usually that the question I actually have - if its been asked - has long ago been deleted as a duplicate. And the only question remaining on the site is subtly different from the problem I'm actually facing. Or the answer is tragically out of date. Perhaps if people asked better questions, the moderators would be happier. But the site shouldn't be run purely for the benefit of its moderators.

It became a meme. "How do I do X in javascript?" "Here's how you do it using jQuery." "But I'm not using jquery." "Question closed!"