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points by rpdillon 15 hours ago | 0 comments
> This is wrong.

This is exactly what drove me away. It's basically Pournelle's iron law of bureaucracy. SO got so overrun with people that were dedicated to Maintaining Order that the site itself stopped being useful. I feel like at least half the time I would go visit, the question that brought me there had been marked as a duplicate or closed. Pointing out that the fire hose is mostly low quality doesn't change this.

All those people fighting to keep SO pristine now preside over a kingdom of nothing.

[–] matsemann 14 hours ago
Why did it matter if the question you visited was closed as a duplicate? Still you would find your answer by following it. People wrongly think a duplicate was something wrong. They probably could've made it clearer.
[–] Sohcahtoa82 13 hours ago
Because as literally dozens of people have already pointed out, it often wasn't actually a duplicate.

"How do I do X in Python?"

"This has already been answered in <other question>. Closing as duplicate."

And then you look up that other question and it's "How do I do X in PHP?"

Ask how to prevent XSS, and someone will flag it as a duplicate of a question asking how to prevent SQL Injection. Ask how to encode something in Base64, someone will flag it as a duplicate of a question about how to encrypt something with AES.

And the worst part, is that these moron moderators pat themselves on the back for keeping SO clean.

[–] rerdavies 14 hours ago
It was trivially easy to close dup a question that looked like it was a dup from the title, but much harder to actually read the contents of the questions, and realize that they were not. And you got points even if you were completely wrong. SO would have been much better if there were no close dups at all.

And even if the questions were actually duplicates, far too often the answers would be so out of date that it would be better if the question (and the answers) were allowed to start again from scratch.

And I agree: the "opinion" close was toxic as well.

A tragic gamification failure, that contributed significantly to my drift away from SO.

[–] shagie 13 hours ago
> And you got points even if you were completely wrong.

One of the oft repeated ideas is that you got points for closing questions.

You don't. The only ways to get rep on stack overflow is described at https://stackoverflow.com/help/whats-reputation

    You gain reputation when:
    
    question is voted up: +10
    answer is voted up: +10
    article is voted up: +10
    answer is marked “accepted”: +15 (+2 to acceptor)
    suggested edit is accepted: +2 (up to +1000 total per user)
    bounty awarded to your answer: + full bounty amount
    one of your answers is awarded a bounty automatically: + half of the bounty amount (see more details about how bounties work)
    site association bonus: +100 on each site (awarded a maximum of one time per site)
You do not get any points for closing a question.
[–] kstrauser 12 hours ago
That's not quite right. Deletionists campaigned to be elected as moderators based on the number of questions they closed. For example: https://stackoverflow.com/election/14

They did not directly increase the integer counter of their reputation score. They did use it to explain why they should be granted increased human reputation as a moderator.

[–] ryathal 12 hours ago
When they added review queues there were badges tied to closing questions. The queues made a lot of existing problems a lot more public and prominent.
[–] shagie 12 hours ago
Badges had no impact on rep or any moderation or curation abilities on the site. Review queues could be completed with "leave open" or "reopen" rather than closing or leaving closed if one was after getting a badge.
[–] shawn_w 9 hours ago
A gold tag badge lets you do some things like closing a question with a single vote.
[–] matsemann 10 hours ago
Most of the badges was for reviewing, a "this question looks fine to me" gave the same progress as "close the question".
[–] jodrellblank 13 hours ago
> "SO would have been much better if there were no close dups at all."

Do you spend much time on Quora? Or AskReddit? Do you like that they are endlessly 'the same' questions over and over and over?

[–] OroPla 10 hours ago
How would you even notice without being chronically online? I visit these places and see users complaining about questions repeating, but never notice myself, since I don't read that kinda stuff every day.
[–] matsemann 10 hours ago
Because the people providing the value here, those answering, saw them day after day. That the freeloaders didn't holds no weight.
[–] chuckadams 14 hours ago
"We're not answering your question because it has words another question has, you're wrong for saying it doesn't answer your question, and you're wrong for thinking we were wrong."

That's a bit clearer. Bit long to engrave on a tombstone though, but SO will remain unburied because after all, most coffins are pretty similar.

[–] Bratmon 13 hours ago
The percentage of questions closed as duplicates that actually

1. Were actually duplicates of existing questions

2. That had a correct, up to date answer

was definitely less than 1%

[–] braiamp 12 hours ago
That's a lie, you know why? Because I've actually counted it, it's less than 20% wrong. And it's mostly because a rule of thumb got grossly misapplied: if you want to know if two questions are duplicate, look at the answers; if they are mostly the same then they likely to be duplicate.

It got grossly misapplied because it became "look at any answer, if one of the answers it the same, then they are duplicate". Note how likeness became overlap and likelyhood became certainty. Two questions where restart might solve the problem became duplicates under that absurd policy. Your example on the other hand I didn't find. I didn't find anyone claiming that two questions are duplicate of one another in different programming languages unless the language is not relevant.

[–] Bratmon 12 hours ago
> Your example on the other hand I didn't find. I didn't find anyone claiming that two questions are duplicate of one another in different programming languages unless the language is not relevant.

Did... Did you just mentally mark my comment as a duplicate question and copy/paste an unrelated answer?

[–] braiamp 11 hours ago
No, I'm classifying your assertion as false and offered reasons why it's false
[–] inetknght 14 hours ago
> People wrongly think a duplicate was something wrong.

No. A duplicate is fine.

What was wrong was when "duplicate" questions were closed in favor of other more-upvoted questions with less-correct answers, or questions that were marked duplicate which were in fact not duplicate.

[–] rerdavies 14 hours ago
Combined with the problem that more correct questions, that were likely to produce more correct answers were closed for further comments when they were incorrectly close-dup-ed. So often you would find the correct answer in the brief window between when the question was asked, and when a member of the self-appointed moderator class had incorrectly close-dup-ed the question. So frustrating!
[–] jodrellblank 12 hours ago
> "a member of the self-appointed moderator class"

It isn't self-appointed, everyone is a 'moderator'. And 'everyone' could vote to re-open closed questions.

[–] pixl97 11 hours ago
This generally doesn't work out on public forums unless there is some larger upset in groups of people.

That is, typically the largest consolidated voting group is going to be your moderators. 5 or 6 people with one particular problem don't represent enough voting pressure to re-open any topic.

[–] ezconnect 13 hours ago
The problem of SO is the duplicate question is years apart. The answer is now different because software version changes along with the APIs. Cancer killed SO, the aggressive policing and killing of noobs who want to contribute.