by zahlman | 2026-01-05 14:42:06+00:00
> 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 Or the answer is tragically out of date.

My experience has been that old answers are not actually "out of date" nearly as often as people would expect.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.