[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!"

[zahlman]

> 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.

No, I was not. Duplicate questions are often very useful.

They just... shouldn't host separate answers in a separate place, because that leads to a) duplicated answering effort and b) dilution of results for third parties who search for the information later.

Having a question like this linked as a duplicate highlights the fact that the same fundamental problem can be conceived of in different ways, and appear different due to ancillary requirements.

> 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

But we aren't talking about different answers. A bit of adaption to ancillary details is expected. Otherwise there would be no duplicate questions, and also no reason to ever try to have Stack Overflow in the first place, because asking on a forum would be fine. Searching the Internet to figure out how to fix your code could never work and never help, because obviously nobody else has ever written your code before.

But problem-solving doesn't actually work that way.

Closing duplicate questions as duplicates is linking them together.

> 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

This is because you are still approaching the site with the mindset of "what do I have to do to get these other people to give me the information I want?"

But it's not (just) about you. A good question will be seen by many other people.

> Its usually that the question I actually have - if its been asked - has long ago been deleted as a duplicate.

Duplicates are not automatically deleted and not ordinarily manually deleted.

> And the only question remaining on the site is subtly different from the problem I'm actually facing.

Would reading the answers give you the information need to solve the problem, after first putting in the expected effort to isolate a single problem? If not, why not? That's what we care about.

> Or the answer is tragically out of date.

My experience has been that old answers are not actually "out of date" nearly as often as people would expect. But when they are, this is fixed by putting a new answer on the existing question. The bounty system was created largely for this reason. It has proven a failure, for a variety of reasons, but that's a failure of understanding gamification, not a problem with the model.

> 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's frankly infuriating to read things like this. I have already said so many times that the overwhelming majority of the people objected to are not moderators, but people insist on using that language, not making any effort to understand the existing community, and then wondering why they feel unwelcome. More importantly, though, we are going out of our way to try to build something that benefits everyone. While most people asking questions are thinking only of themselves.

[josephg]

Thanks for replying. I find your point of view for all this fascinating.

With your experience, why do you think the site is failing? What could or should be done to save it?

[zahlman]

Top-level view:

from the perspective of people who aren't explicitly trying to teach on their own initiative, overall the site has outlived its purpose. In that time it drew way too many total questions to surface what's actually valuable; between that and no functional search (the internal search was always bad; Google et. al. got worse over time, partly intentionally) you're lucky to find anything valuable.

I'm not generally worried about out-of-date answers; the truly outdated answers are mostly on outdated questions, describing situations that don't come up any more or premises that are no longer valid for ordinary programmers (e.g., fixing problems with obsolete tools).

Combing through to curate properly is too little, too late now. Much stronger (but polite, of course) gatekeeping was required earlier on, which in turn required (among other things) proper means for communication between "core" users and the public. At this point, it's best to start over (hence the part where I'm now a moderator at Codidact).

There's a lot more I want to say, but I don't have it organized in my head and this is way downthread already. Perhaps I could interest you in a hypothetical future blog post?