My stackoverflow question was closed so here's a blog post about CoreWCF

I used to be very active on StackOverflow, it was a great platform.

After a while, I stopped having to post questions about "common frameworks", either because I could do with the official docs of because there was already a StackOverflow answer for my question.

What was becoming more common was that I would have a question similar to an existing unanswered one. Or that my question would never receive an answer (presumably because my questions were becoming more tricky/niche). So what I started doing was answering my own question (or answering those existing unanswered ones) after solving it on my own. Still, it was fine and I was contributing.

And for some reason, a few years ago my questions started being closed for no apparent reason other than "those who reviewed it have no clue and think that it is invalid". Many times they closed even though I had posted both the question and the answer at the same time (as a way to help others)! The first few times, I fought to get my question reopened and guess what? They all got a few tens of votes in the following year. Not so useless, eh?

Still, that toxic moderation hasn't changed. If anything, it has gotten worse. So I stopped contributing to StackOverflow entirely. If I find information there, that's great, if not, I won't go and add it once I find a solution for myself. I am usually better off opening an issue or discussion directly with the upstream project, bypassing StackOverflow's moderation.

I heard people mentioning that LLMs were hurting StackOverflow badly. I'm here to say that what pushed me away was the toxic moderation, not LLMs.

The moderators were elected. What should StackOverflow have done, held a vote of no confidence? Given them less power; make moderation more democratic?

just a few months ago they closed a question of mine that I posted in 2010 (!), which in the meanwhile had gathered more than 1000 votes, nearly one million views, and 20 or so answers. I get it that it does not meet their most recent criteria, but closing a question after 15 years telling me to edit my question and read the comments on how it could be improved (there were none) sounds tone deaf and unnecessarily bureaucratic

maybe set different guidelines for moderation? have some form of meta moderation?

The core problem of SO was the the goal of it (and what made it great) is very much in tension with "I want to ask whatever questions I want."

The original idea of SO was building a knowledge repository, and that meant no duplication and pruning it endlessly to make sure it was useful and up to date (which pretty much failed until recently, until its probably far too late) - this core tenet is something the moderators take seriously, and people using the site as questioners (not searchers) absolutely hate.

You can see they are trying to experiment (again probably too late) with how to make question asking easier, more friendly, etc - but that sort of cuts against the core original goals of SO and that's why the mods and the users seemed to be always in tension.

And the irony here is that much of what LLMs know is from training on StackOverflow.

Agreed. Some other points of tension in Stack Exchanges:

1) People want to ask homework questions (_eg_ on Biology, Chemistry, etc). I understand why that is not allowed, but that doesn't change people's desire to 'just have an answer, now!'. I guess that AI could really take over this niche.

2) Others want to ask very open-ended 'discussion' questions that require back-and-forth to get to the answer, which may be on the edge of known research.

While I do understand why people get frustrated about these things, as you point out - this is not what SO (and SEs) are 'for'.

This is an important problem. But most people are readers; that moderation is what made the site a valuable resource. Without it, they would have had to build a powerful search engine. Instead, they did it the old fashioned way, without ML.

In my own experience it's not often the elected moderators that are the problem, but those with a golden tag in a specific tag. They're far too eager to close questions because they're the ones culling through a tag often - and then close the question as they quickly think "oh, it's that again".

But it often isn't, they just didn't spend enough time to see nuance.

And neither do they see that even if _they_ understand that the question linked to is the same thing, there is no way the asker can understand what the similarity is from their knowledge point of view (or why the linked duplicate question is the same question).

I don't think this is charitable enough to the user's complaints, or even the person you are responding to.

If the moderation was effective and limited, people would ultimately be fine with it.

What people don't like is having a question closed as "duplicate" even though what it supposedly duplicates is very different, or any of the other myriad complaints.

The same story goes for Wikipedia. Moderators have an agenda, act in frequently erroneous ways, and are actively hostile to criticism.

There should always be some sort of human to appeal to. Even Wikipedia has it this way at least formally [1], although "office actions" overruling community moderation decisions are extremely rare.

[1] https://foundation.wikimedia.org/wiki/Policy:Wikimedia_Found...

Yes, they WERE elected, by the community (i.e. those asking and answering questions) and did a good job. Then those elected were dumped by the new owners and replaced by a bunch of yes-men. The people voting on closing submissions were not mods (in general) but ordinary users with sufficient rep.

> The original idea of SO was building a knowledge repository, and that meant no duplication and pruning it endlessly

This is not true as I recall. On Joel and Jeff's podcast, Joel in particular was in favour of having lots of variants of the same question answered repeatedly. His rationale was that if people didn't find the golden original question, there was a reason for that (e.g. it's not a real duplicate, or it's a different frame of thinking about the problem shared by other people), and adding the supposed duplicate would mean that other people who search for it - and would similarly fail to find the golden original - would land on the supposed duplicate. Net win.

But this was in tension with cheap karma farmers. SO was structured as a points economy, but in any case anything with points rewards motivates some people to play the game of collecting points. A cheap way of farming points is to ask trivial questions then answer them yourself, or participate in an implicit network of people asking and answering trivial questions. How do you cut that out? Have canonical versions of the trivial questions, redirect people to them while asking, and motivate deduplication.

What was the question?

If it is from 2010 and was a relevant question or answer then but has since become irrelevant or even wrong because the framework or language has moved on I actually support this kind of clean up.

There are a lot of best practices that just don't apply anymore that far down the line. Even simple things like whats the best way to use a variable inside of a string in Python would have an outdated (and to most users, wrong) answer if it was from 2010.

I stopped flagging things on SO when some of my flags were deemed unhelpful. They clearly weren't.

How do you think they should have handled closing questions, if at all?

Look, I'm all for democracy in the real world, but this is a very bad use of democratic processes for a number of reasons:

1. First and foremost, it's not a democracy if your turnout is too low. The 2024 election had voter turnout of 2%, which would be a catastrophic turnout in any real democracy. Either too few knew about the election, too few thought their vote mattered, or too few had any idea how to choose between the options. Any of these reasons requires immediate and pressing attention if a democracy is to be called that.

2. Never having re-elections makes it useless. For it to be a truly democratic process there absolutely needs to be a way to withdraw consent from a moderator who behaves differently than expected. So yeah, a no confidence vote would be an option, or better yet regular elections to hold a position.

I'm afraid that the largest problem is that democracy is really just a bad fit for this kind of site. By its nature the only people who are likely to vote in this type of election are a small dedicated core, not the enormous number of users that the site actually serves. A small core of contributors to a community resource invariably seems to develop a sense of "us against the world"—the thin blue line of police lore isn't an isolated thing, it's what happens when people view themselves as lone defenders of something they care about. And just like with police, that can result in a toxic culture that begins to actively degrade the plebian outgroup that they started out serving.

I don't have a better answer, but I don't believe democracy is a good fit for moderators on the scale of community that Stack Overflow operates. It's too big to have good turnout, and the problems caused by bad turnout have become catastrophic.

I’d appreciate if somebody more familiar with SO would verify this, but I believe there’s some low constant number of close votes required to close something, and this doesn’t adapt to how many people are voting or to positive signals. Because there’s an error rate in all things, this naturally means that things are wrongly closed all the time, especially content that’s viewed a lot and not fought for.

> in tension with "I want to ask whatever questions I want."

As I said, I strongly disagree with the idea that my questions were unfit for StackOverflow. Every single time their reason was "duplication", it was not AT ALL a duplicate. Two different questions (sometimes obviously very different) with two different answers. Hell, they closed some of those as duplicate even though I posted both the question and the answer, and the answer was completely different from the one they were pointing to.

This is not "I want to ask whatever questions I want". It's bad moderation.

Then the answer is clear; copy paste a lot of dang to moderate. So this is clearly a management faulted no properly choosing a moderator.

How about making it a site where only people who answer questions can even be eligible to be moderators?

What if moderators had to actually have karma from recently answering questions or they lose mod privileges?

Wouldn't that be a fresh change. You'd have to actually work to be a mod.

...

It shouldn't be controversial. That mods currently make visitors unwelcome is disgrace. :(

That SO incentivizes that behavior is ridiculous.

StackOverflow's content is contributed by regular folks under an open source license.

I left SO a long time ago when it was really at its peak. Your SO score was starting to be used as a metric to get hired for jobs in the valley. At that time moderation was totally out of control. One contributor in particular* would find a post he didn't like, then go to chat rooms to rally a downvote brigade. It was so toxic I called it quits on the spot. I still use SO quite a bit, but through DDG. I search for something, it displays an answer that it scraped from SO. Some years ago I read that they made an effort to soften the atmosphere there because they realized it was chasing away female devs and other minority groups. I guess they couldn't turn it around.

*Later he took over the Flask project and I was still bitter so I stopped using that too.

That's part of the reason that as an employer I don't like worker democracy anywhere I work.

With the usual model, I can just negotiate directly with management and they can tell me yes or no, and we can make a contract (or be a bit vaguer and make promises).

With worker democracy, there's no one I can negotiate with that can tell me anything definitive.

> I actually support this kind of clean up.

I don't understand the idea. Are you also in favour of deleting blog posts that are older than a couple years? There is a date next to the question...

In real world terms, it is not that big a democracy, but the founders may have judged against mandatory voting. First, it would have added friction that could have impeded growth. Second, the voters may not have been qualified; they did not use the site enough to be able to or care to select one moderator over another.

There's a metric incentivizing "maintenance tasks" so the system is biased toward the side of closing and duplicating.

And because recourse is so hard and goes trough the same gatekeepers anyway, they don't get any signal about the accuracy of the maintenance.

One of the reason I've left as well was bureaucrats wrecking havoc to perfectly reasonable answers trying to rack up these points.

Peak of the fenomenon was 2014 when people started publishing their so scores on their resumes, but the platform never really recovered.

In my case, the questions were closed very quickly. I opened votes to reopen a few times, one of which eventually passed, and then upvotes started to come regularly.

As I said, those were pretty specialised questions, you can't expect to have 10 upvotes in the first day for those.

Why close questions? Is there a limit on storage space?

dang doesn't go and delete all the infinite failed submissions to HN, after all.

That tension existed.

https://blog.codinghorror.com/introducing-stackoverflow-com/

> Stackoverflow is sort of like the anti-experts-exchange (minus the nausea-inducing sleaze and quasi-legal search engine gaming) meets wikipedia meets programming reddit. It is by programmers, for programmers, with the ultimate intent of collectively increasing the sum total of good programming knowledge in the world. No matter what programming language you use, or what operating system you call home. Better programming is our goal.

The emphasis on "good" is in the original.

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2008/09/15/stack-overflow-lau...

> What kind of questions are appropriate? Well, thanks to the tagging system, we can be rather broad with that. As long as questions are appropriately tagged, I think it’s okay to be off topic as long as what you’re asking about is of interest to people who make software. But it does have to be a question. Stack Overflow isn’t a good place for imponderables, or public service announcements, or vague complaints, or storytelling.

---

And then, go to https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1003841/how-do-i-move-th...

I would draw your attention to its history and the original version: https://stackoverflow.com/revisions/1003841/1

and the action taken on September 17th, 2011. https://stackoverflow.com/posts/1003841/revisions

> One of the reason I've left as well was bureaucrats wrecking havoc to perfectly reasonable answers trying to rack up these points.

This. It is exactly the problem with incentives.

At some point I was wondering why Tor was not offering incentives, which is something Nym was talking about. And I found an explanation on the Tor website that said something along those lines: "we thought about incentives, but we decided that we wanted contributions from people who cared, not from interested people". Makes sense to me.

Slashdot of all places basically solved the moderation problem, with random moderators selected from the pool of "know users" and then others selected to meta moderate.

I'm not proposing mandatory voting, but you have to fix turnout somehow or just openly acknowledge that you're running on a non-democratic system.

> Second, the voters may not have been qualified; they did not use the site enough to be able to or care to select one moderator over another.

This is exactly the attitude I'm talking about. I think the dedicated core actually does believe this: that nothing is broken, it's okay that the outgroup doesn't vote because they'd just ruin things if they did.

> as an employer I don't like worker democracy

Well... obviously :-)

Same here.

I have a rep that is based almost entirely on questions, not answers. I learned to ask questions fairly well (to the point I seldom get answers -there's a price to pay, for questions that are very specific).

In some cases, the question is a basic one, and doesn't need a code listing and sample project. It's still a perfectly valid, pertinent, thoughtful question, but not very verbose.

Those questions almost always get closed.

I have found that asking LLMs doesn't always get me the best answer, but I get an answer. In some cases, I can have an iterative refinement, where I keep adjusting the question, until I get a useful answer.

I've never gotten code from SO, that I can use without modification, but I have gotten some great answers, over the years, and have expressed gratitude and respect.

I have gotten quite annoyed with the "attitude" that is often expressed. There's no doubt that folks who ask questions, are considered "lesser beings" on SO. Just look at the question-to-answer ratio of the high-score individuals. Weird attitude, for a site that is pretty much completely reliant on questions.

Basically, I have just given up on SO, and have found LLMs to give me what I used to get from it.

In my opinion, they have killed SO.

I think you misunderstand how stackoverflow works.

Super moderators are elected, but not your regular "moderators". In stack overflow, regular folks you have enough karma are moderators and can cast votes, or initiate voting on moderation action. Enough votes and the action happens.

The elected moderators aren't the problem, generally, it's that anyone with a bit of karma can go power tripping and if you get enough of those people on an ever growing platform, they reach a critical mass to stifle anything.

So yes, some moderators are elected, and yes moderation is very democratic.

I don't remember slashdot moderation being particularly good. Innovative yes, but not good. I got to be a moderator multiple times while I was a teen. I'm sure I didn't make good decisions.

With standard fraud detection systems especially since you need to accumulate karma before interacting so by the time a user can do damage you have plenty information about its network that you can comb for anomalies and patterns

It is; however, I doubt most contributors would put in effort if they knew the main purpose of what they were typing out and researching would be grist for a for-profit (let's not kid ourselves) AI business.

The constant closing of questions isn't enough for them, very often they'll straight up delete content as well, thereby completely wasting any effort that you or others have put in. Closed questions with useful answers and comments and links? Gone.

Why spend your own time and effort adding content to someone else's platform anyway? It's always a much better idea to write an article on your own website than a stackoverflow answer. Stackoverflow just takes a little less effort but that doesn't matter when your effort is likely to be invalidated anyway.

I had stopped interacting with SO as well, though the fact didn't really cross my mind. I had a few popular answers that got be enough points to be a moderator. The experience there is similar--possibly worse because the idiocy is unveiled. In the past I've often argued to reopen questions, sometimes even making edits to make it more agreeable to other mods.

It's common for those to get shouted down based on some policy or other bureaucratic nonsense by those who have no idea what the question is actually about. The problem could be that many of those who don't do, moderate. It attracts different sorts of people than those that are actually working with the things being discussed.

It worked surprisingly well long into "popularity" - at least for the purposes of getting spam removed and corralling flame bait away.

For a "user-run" site it was pretty advanced at the time - you could choose your level to view at (5 was quick summary of the highlights, -1 if you wanted flamewars about NetBSD), stories were curated enough to prevent slop (at least at the beginning), and metamoderating removed the biggest abuses.

Why would I want to go to a blog post that also describes the wrong way to do something?

I never said delete anything, but deprecation warnings, closure, and subsequent SEO down ranking of formerly correct but now incorrect/irrelevant answers would be a huge improvement to StackOverflow. Somebody may need to to know the best way to handle permissions in Java on Android 6.0, but it absolutely should not be a top question or answer in 2025 unless somebody is specifically looking for it.

I had 15k reputation score at one time on SO. It recently dropped down to due to people deleting their accounts. There are review queues which appear on the top nav incentivizing power users with enough rep to go in and take action like closing requests.

Having met many SO power users in group settings over the years, I feel that there is very little tolerance for questions that require effort to understand. If it's a simple question posed by a non-English speaker that needs some thought, then it doesn't belong (but that's why comments were introduced later.) The same goes for a deeper technical question where the author gets it all out but doesn't take the time to structure or format it. The volume of behavior like this differs based on the type of question and experts prepared to weigh in.

This gets compounded by the up and comers on the reputation scale. They get their special powers and see this BOFH close behavior and replicate it. Over time it starts to become the norm. I had the ability to vote for reopens and these same people would argue about why this was a bad idea. They weren't prepared to admit they were wrong and felt they were doing God's work by ridding the site of poor questions when some of us even had the ability to make edits to clarify them.

I just opened the site after some time away. At the top, pushing the question list below the fold, are: Reputation, Badge Progress, and Watched Tags blocks. The Interesting Posts for You question feed is below that and I have to go see how that is constructed. I only ever wanted the firehose of new questions with my tags highlighted.

EDIT: The behavior I noted above is yet example of why I always want to know how a job candidate deals with ambiguity. In my experience, this has a massive impact on the ability to work independently, not piss off colleagues/clients/customers, and make good decisions.

> There's a metric incentivizing "maintenance tasks" so the system is biased toward the side of closing and duplicating.

Could you describe this? A lot of people seem to believe that closing or duplicating questions awards reputation. It doesn't.

The complete list of reputation gain sources is at https://stackoverflow.com/help/whats-reputation

Somehow I never found the StackOverflow game to be worth playing.

In retrospect it is a case study of a particular enshittification scenario: "benign neglect" Back when they published a data dump I had a project on my speculative list to clean up their database, take only the best answers, etc. For python, the numerous Python 2 examples

   print "something"

would get rewritten to Python 3

   print("something")

basically do the maintenance work they weren't doing. Personally I find their idea of what is a valid question to ask offensive. If you're coding in Java or Javascript for example, the question of "Guava vs. Spring" or "Vue vs. React" are probably more consequential decisions for your app as opposed to anything else but questions like that are forbidden.

> After a while, I stopped having to post questions about "common frameworks", either because I could do with the official docs of because there was already a StackOverflow answer for my question.

Good. That's the site working as designed and intended.

> What was becoming more common was that I would have a question similar to an existing unanswered one.

Then you should improve the existing unanswered question instead, and/or draw attention to it (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/265874 ; https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/266338). Or, yes, answer it if you can. Thank you for doing so.

> Or that my question would never receive an answer (presumably because my questions were becoming more tricky/niche).

That's a big presumption. I got an answer to https://stackoverflow.com/questions/75677825/ within hours.

> for some reason, a few years ago my questions started being closed for no apparent reason other than "those who reviewed it have no clue and think that it is invalid"

This is absolutely not what happened. First off, when your question is closed, you get a banner at the top of your question indicating which of the few standard close reasons was chosen. The wording isn't always a great fit (especially in the cases where people voted for more than one close reason - please keep in mind that we neither write this explanation nor get to choose the text; it's pulled from a database following simple mapping rules, and even moderators have only very indirect influence over that database) but it does normally point you in the right direction.

Second, "I don't know the answer" is not a valid close reason. People constantly accuse (on the meta site and elsewhere) that someone else's close vote was motivated by this; there's never any real way to evidence that, and this kind of accusation is in fact what we consider toxic behaviour (an assumption of bad faith).

> Many times they closed even though I had posted both the question and the answer at the same time (as a way to help others)!

The fact that you provide your own answer weighs exactly zero in the calculation of closing a question. It must meet the site standards. Part of the purpose of a question is to index the information in the answer - so no matter how brilliant your explanation of the underlying problem might be, your exposition of the problem is a limiting factor.

> The first few times, I fought to get my question reopened and guess what? They all got a few tens of votes in the following year.

The community does make mistakes, in both directions. The meta site exists for a reason.

But part of "fighting to get a question reopened" is editing it. Changes you might think are trivial might be crucial according to our standards. Some questions fundamentally can't be fixed; but when they can, closing a question signals that the OP's perspective is needed to fix the problem, no matter how minor. If we could fix it (without worrying about trampling on your authorial intent), we would.

>Still, that toxic moderation hasn't changed. If anything, it has gotten worse.

It's not moderation, but curation. It's overwhelmingly done by a community of volunteers - not by the two dozen or so moderators (also volunteers) looking over an accumulation of literally millions of users and questions.

And it isn't "toxic". Overwhelmingly, people aren't doing it out of any kind of vendetta or a desire to cause you or anyone else a problem. They're doing it to uphold a standard (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/417476/) designed (really, developed over many years by community discussion on the meta site) to accomplish particular goals (https://stackoverflow.com/tour ; https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/254770).

> I am usually better off opening an issue or discussion directly with the upstream project

If it's something that makes sense to handle this way, it probably doesn't also make sense in the Q&A format. We can't do anything about your bug report.

> I heard people mentioning that LLMs were hurting StackOverflow badly.

A lot of people think so because the volume of questions has dropped off dramatically, and there's good evidence that people will ask an LLM instead of asking on Stack Overflow.

But this is not at all "hurting Stack Overflow", unless you're a staff member at the company and you specifically worry about the effect of this decline on ad revenue.

If asking an LLM - trained on millions of existing Stack Overflow questions, along with the rest of the Internet - gives you an actually working answer (and you're either in a position where you can deal with AI hallucinations, or are lucky enough not to experience one), then that is, almost certainly, not a question that helps improve the existing resource that is Stack Overflow. It's most likely a duplicate or near-duplicate.

Duplicate questions on Stack Overflow are not inherently bad; sometimes rephrasing a question helps by providing a "signpost" so that people who think about a problem in a different way can realize that it's still the same problem, and there's still the same fundamental question to answer about it. But we want everyone who has that question to find the same collection of answers; and we want that collection of answers to be high quality, not redundant, and categorized under a high quality version of the question. That way, when you use a search engine and find Stack Overflow Q&A, you get the best possible result, as quickly as possible.

Nowadays, there are about three times as many publicly available questions on Stack Overflow as there are articles on Wikipedia. Considering that the scope of Stack Overflow is "practical questions about programming", while the scope of Wikipedia is "literally any noteworthy real-world object or phenomenon", that's clearly too many already. So why worry about the influx of new questions slowing down?

Snark like this is neither productive nor accurate.

Regarding the now flagged and killed response:

> Link to a duplicate that isn't actually a duplicate, yet you will still get your question closed as a duplicate with a link to the "dupe" you linked and directly stated as not actually a duplicate.

Unfortunately, it would be both too time consuming and too traumatic to share with you the years of experience I have on the meta site of people protesting that their very obvious duplicates were not duplicates because of trivial and irrelevant details, not to mention the people resisting the idea of duplicate closure on principle. But as I've said in other comments already: if you think something isn't a duplicate, you're welcome to take the case to the meta site.

Hi, I'm intimately familiar with Stack Overflow (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/users/523612).

It requires either:

* Three votes (it used to be 5) from community members with the close vote privilege (awarded at 3000 reputation)

* Unilateral closure by a moderator (there are currently 24 of these: https://stackoverflow.com/users?tab=moderators - compare to 29 million user accounts: https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/1877958/c... )

* Unilateral closure as a duplicate by a user with the close vote privilege who also has a gold badge for one of the tags originally used on the question (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/254589)

The thresholds are deliberately fairly low, mainly because closure of new bad questions must happen promptly for the site to work as intended (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/260263). This is frankly a major fault in the site design; but the new Staging Ground feature (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/430404) helps a lot, on the occasions when the site software actually decides to use it.

However, "closing" content "that's viewed a lot" (this basically only ever means old questions; new questions rarely ever get a lot of views, regardless of quality, unless it's from spambots - see https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/431084) is emphatically not wrong. We close old, popular questions all the time, because they don't currently meet site standards (usually, because they are no longer deemed on topic). This is at least partly to discourage new questions along the same lines; but the primary effect of closing a question is to prevent answers from being contributed. These old questions generally wouldn't need new answers (although edits to existing answers may be helpful - and are not blocked) even if they were still considered suitable.

> There's a metric incentivizing "maintenance tasks" so the system is biased toward the side of closing and duplicating.

If only. Sorry to say, all of this curation effort happens purely by intrinsic motivation - a desire to see a better-curated site.

It's objectively a good thing when more questions get closed (including marking duplicates) because the overwhelming majority of what gets posted is nowhere near meeting standards, and because those standards have been carefully considered with the site's goals in mind.

Those goals just don't happen to match the goals of the overwhelming majority of people who come to ask a new question on Stack Overflow. That's because they don't understand the site's purpose. There is a tremendous amount of misinformation out there (and the site owners are at least complicit in this, because it drives traffic).

In point of fact, my reputation increased the most during a period when I barely used the site at all, because I accumulated votes on answers I'd already written. And I didn't care about any of that, because it gets you absolutely nothing past IIRC about 35000. (The last privilege - https://stackoverflow.com/help/privileges - is awarded at 25000, but past that you can get an increase in the number of flags and votes you can cast daily. It would take an unimaginable level of obsession with the site to ever run out of validly raised flags, but I have run out of closure votes on several occasions.)

When I came back, I started actually paying attention to the meta site and understanding how Stack Overflow is actually intended to work, instead of just being another random person trying to contribute expertise. And my reputation has actually levelled off and declined, mainly because I award generous bounties for existing exceptional answers, or to promote the few high-quality questions I find that need a better answer (especially, questions that I'd like to use as a duplicate target, but wouldn't provide others asking the question with a good enough answer).

> bureaucrats wrecking havoc to perfectly reasonable answers trying to rack up these points.

It's not bureaucracy and it isn't "trying to rack up points". You get two reputation points for an accepted answer, only if you don't already have at least 1000 points and only if you get two out of three users with unilateral edit privileges to agree that it's a good edit (and they, in turn, are incentivized to steal your edit - not for reputation, but because they can get it published unilaterally instead of waiting for someone else to approve). You can't even reach unilateral edit privileges this way, since you need 2000 points for that.

Among people making edits unilaterally - both to questions and answers - this is overwhelmingly motivated by good faith attempts to improve quality. "Perfectly reasonable" is not the standard. The standard is "as good as the available attention allows" (ideally, people focus on more popular content). When you post on Stack Overflow, you license the content to the community (and separately also to the site and company) and they are absolutely within their rights to make good faith edits. If you want to share "your" ideas with the world and not allow others to touch, use a blog.

> If it's a simple question posed by a non-English speaker that needs some thought, then it doesn't belong (but that's why comments were introduced later.)

No, that's not why. If we can understand the English, we edit to fix the English.

We constantly get questions by native English speakers that are nevertheless barely comprehensible. Even when the problem is clearly described, it still needs to meet several other standards (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/417476/). This is by design.

We aren't closing questions because we want to close questions. We're closing questions because they need to be improved by the OP (i.e., fixing the question requires OP's perspective or knowledge) before they are compatible with the site's objectives, which do not necessarily align with yours as a person who has a question.

This is not a punishment and is not in general a permanent state. Closed questions can be, and are, re-opened if the problem with the question is fixed (without fundamentally changing it).

> I just opened the site after some time away. At the top, pushing the question list below the fold, are: Reputation, Badge Progress, and Watched Tags blocks.

And the people doing the majority of the curation work do not care in the slightest about reputation or badges. I certainly don't.

The users with the most reputation are generally the ones who spend hours a day answering easy questions that don't come anywhere close to meeting the site's standards (not because they're easy, but because they're terribly asked and probably duplicates) after doing a bit of mind-reading to figure out what the terribly-asked question is (or scanning through a couple dozen lines of code for trivial problems without really reading the question - because they usually don't need to) and getting a quick upvote and accept from the OP.

Questions like that have ruined the site and continue to make it worse - by diluting search results, by making it harder for curators to find the "canonical" targets for closing duplicates, by click-baiting away from questions other people actually want to find (e.g. by describing a completely different problem with all the same keywords, or by completely misidentifying what's wrong), and most of all by the broken-window effect (bad content examples overwhelm good ones).

But the reputation system rewards people who answer those questions. (The obsessive answer writers I complain about the most in Stack Overflow chat often have 10x or more my reputation.)

Curators have had a goal of closing bad new questions quickly (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/260263), trying to beat the answer to the punch. But answer-writers get a grace period, and can fill in a stub answer and edit it later; and they can act unilaterally while curators usually have to come to a consensus.

> In my case, the questions were closed very quickly.

I'm happy to hear it. This is how it's supposed to work. If the system were properly designed, questions would start out closed - that is to say: the community would have a chance to fully refine the question and ensure that it meets the site's standards, before people were allowed to write answers.

(The new Staging Ground implements a form of this, for a small selection of new questions.)

The point is to ensure that everyone who has the same question can have an optimal experience by finding it: they should see a question that's easy for them to read and understand; they should easily be able to verify that it's the same question (even though it came up in a radically different context for someone else); they should be able to come across it with a search engine (so the title should make sense, etc.); and it should be properly focused. Then they can scroll down - ideally, not very far - and see the answers, already written, without themselves having to ask again and wait.

> you can't expect to have 10 upvotes in the first day for those.

Ultimately, the thing that gets a question 10 upvotes in the first day is off-site exposure. That's not how it's supposed to work, but the Internet is what it is.

That's indeed a large part of why I stopped writing new questions and answers. But I do still edit, and redirect old duplicates to a better version of the question, etc. - because high quality information deserves to be highlighted, even if it may "fall into the wrong hands".

It's always been typed out to further a for profit business. The AI part is new. Stack Overflow has never been shy about the fact that they're trying to make money.

If the AI changes things, then one should ask why the individual was contributing when Stack Overflow Inc was the business reaping the financial rewards of community contributions.

> The moderators were elected.

The overwhelming majority of the actions people complain about in this context (never mind that they don't understand the purpose of those actions or the underlying objectives) are not performed by moderators. They are curation actions taken by members of the community.

The rights to do so are awarded based on reputation, in a very poorly thought out and fundamentally broken incentive system; but there are far more people involved than the moderators. You can query by reputation at https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/1834631/c... : there are about 29 million total user accounts, 3.3 million which may upvote, 1.1 million which may downvote, 150 thousand which may unilaterally edit posts, 100 thousand which may vote to close questions, 28 thousand which may vote to soft-delete posts (and view soft-deleted posts), 9300 with access to internal site analytics...

and twenty-four moderators (https://stackoverflow.com/users?tab=moderators). Who are not the highest-reputation users. (I have more reputation than over half of them, and I frequently complain about users with over ten times my reputation.)

> Never having re-elections makes it useless. For it to be a truly democratic process there absolutely needs to be a way to withdraw consent from a moderator who behaves differently than expected. So yeah, a no confidence vote would be an option, or better yet regular elections to hold a position.

Notwithstanding everything else I said above about how "moderation" is actually almost completely irrelevant here, and the overwhelming majority of what people call "moderation" is in fact curation done by community members in more or less a direct democracy:

We have elections annually (https://stackoverflow.com/election), and so does each Stack Exchange site generally. Moderators generally must voluntarily step down barring a major problem; but this was carefully considered at the start (https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/984).

> In my own experience it's not often the elected moderators that are the problem, but those with a golden tag in a specific tag. They're far too eager to close questions because they're the ones culling through a tag often - and then close the question as they quickly think "oh, it's that again".

> But it often isn't, they just didn't spend enough time to see nuance.

As a gold badge holder (for Python and a few other things), I see this complaint constantly. It is without merit ~90% of the time. The simple fact is that the "nuance" seen by the person asking the question is just not relevant to us, because the point of the site is not to give you a personalized answer, but to build a reference where the questions are useful to everyone. This entails collecting useful answers together so that people with fundamentally the same question can all find them, instead of it depending on how lucky their search engine of choice is feeling today.

The meta site has historically been flooded with people trying to reopen blatant duplicates based on trivial distinctions, at the level of "no, I want to get the Nth item of a list, not a tuple". That isn't a direct quote, but it's not an exaggeration either. I wish it were.

We do make mistakes, in part because there's pressure to act quickly. It's much harder to keep the site clean when answers get posted where they shouldn't be. Closing questions prevents answers from coming in.

> there is no way the asker can understand what the similarity is from their knowledge point of view (or why the linked duplicate question is the same question).

I try to leave a comment to explain the connection when it isn't obvious. (Another common thing that happens is that the problem someone wants to solve involves an obvious two- or three-step procedure, and each step is a matter of fundamental technique that's already been explained countless times.) But overall, it isn't our goal to teach. We answer very simple questions, and very difficult questions; but we aren't designed to teach. Sometimes it's hard to ask a simple question, because you have to figure out what the question is first. It's unfortunate that people who need the question answered often don't have that skill. But if we have a high quality version of that question already, we can direct people there.

Sometimes the linked duplicate isn't the best choice. You can help by finding and promoting a better choice - on the meta site and in the chat rooms. You can also help by editing common duplicate targets - both questions and answers - so that it becomes more clear to people who would actually have the question, that they're in the right place (and so that the information in answers is more readily applicable to them).

> Why close questions?

Because we're trying to build a searchable reference, such that if you try to look for an existing question, you a) find it; b) find the right question; c) find the best possible version of that question; d) can readily tell that you found what you want.

And because we are explicitly not trying to build a discussion forum, social media, "HN but specifically for programming questions", or anything else like that.

You might as well ask: why delete newly created pages on Wikipedia, or revert edits to existing pages?

There is: you can appeal to the community in general, and most curation (not "moderation"!) was done by agreement between community members in the first place.

If you ask a question on Stack Overflow and it gets closed, you are generally expected to edit it to fix the identified problem and submit it for re-evaluation. It gets put in a queue that other users can review; and everyone with close-vote privileges also has reopen-vote privileges, and can come along randomly and evaluate the question anew.

If you believe the community has misunderstood something about the question or has misapplied policy, you can ask about it on https://meta.stackoverflow.com . However, when you come to the meta site, you are generally expected to have a basic understanding of what the policy is and what our goals are (hint: not helping you, personally, make your code work), and to accept that you may have misunderstood something. And you should be prepared for the fact that voting works differently on meta (https://stackoverflow.com/help/whats-meta).

People who vote to close your question (or downvote it) are explicitly not required to explain this (again for well considered reasons, largely around the risk of harassment or abuse: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/357436). But usually, if the standard close-reason advice won't be obvious, someone will try to explain. If they think the question is unclear, they'll try to say specifically why they are confused; if it seems to lack focus, they'll highlight the separate problems you're asking about or explain what seems irrelevant; if it "needs debugging details" then they'll explain how your code sample falls short of the https://stackoverflow.com/help/minimal-reproducible-example standard.

If you need an explanation and don't get one, you can again ask on meta. Despite the downvoting, if you're polite and understanding (i.e. don't come in with the mindset that we must have made a mistake or are doing something wrong by having a site that works differently from other sites), we'll be polite and sympathetic, and try to explain as best we can.

> Every single time their reason was "duplication", it was not AT ALL a duplicate. Two different questions (sometimes obviously very different) with two different answers.

Please feel free to show concrete examples, and I'd be happy to try to explain the reasoning.

I don't even consider what the user asks - simply that it was rejected and it was a question they wanted to ask - hence "whatever they wanted", and while I agree SO's moderation is overly burdensome (and was a mod myself once more than a decade ago) I don't agree that moderation that's effective and limited having users being "ultimately fine with it" - it totally depends on which users you ask.

> If you're coding in Java or Javascript for example, the question of "Guava vs. Spring" or "Vue vs. React" are probably more consequential decisions for your app as opposed to anything else but questions like that are forbidden.

Over time we found that hardly anyone asking questions could achieve the kind of "good subjectivity" that we wanted. Questions like this attract flame wars (which are especially obnoxious in a format with answer posts with non-threaded comments) and advertising for alternatives, add-ons etc. that result in a completely derailed discussion in a place that isn't supposed to have a discussion at all.

If you want to ask "what factors should I take into consideration when choosing..." then I would agree that can in principle fit on a Q&A site. But open-endedness again makes it hard to choose the best answers and ensure they float to the top.

The general principles are much the same at Codidact Software (https://software.codidact.com), but the scope is considerably wider than Stack Overflow's (https://software.codidact.com/posts/search?search=category%3...). You might have better luck with that kind of question there.

The underlying system has some weird behaviours and moderators are sometimes compelled to mark flags they find helpful as unhelpful. This might happen, for example, if you report something as "rude or abusive" where they agree that the content should be removed, but disagree that the user should be penalized. But also, a lot of problems are better handled by just editing out objectionable content. When you flag a question as a duplicate or as "needs improvement", that goes to the community; but everything else is sent to a team of 24 volunteers overlooking a site that still receives thousands of questions a week and is still full of years-old comments that should be cleaned up but which nobody has gotten around to yet.

Closing a question on Stack Overflow doesn't delete it or hide it from public view, so the comparison doesn't make sense. Closing an old, popular question only prevents it from receiving new answers and puts a banner at the top. The point is to avoid setting bad examples for new questions. The fact that a question was well received many years ago does not guarantee that it's in agreement with current policy.

Additionally, we generally do not close old questions simply because they're "outdated", e.g. refer to deprecated libraries etc. We recognize that people are often stuck maintaining unsupported legacy systems, effectively indefinitely. We sometimes close questions because they refer to services (especially web APIs) that are no longer available. But overwhelmingly, when old popular questions get closed, it's because they're deemed to be no longer on topic for the site. Since a lot of people will see the question, we don't want them to get the wrong idea about what's topical.

And, of course, it makes perfect sense to downvote things that used to be correct but are now incorrect. Practically speaking, this doesn't happen nearly enough; upvotes have a kind of inertia, and wrong answers are often evaluated by people who don't know they're wrong.

By the way: about 89% of up/downvotes ever cast on Stack Overflow are up (https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/492368/to...).

> because the point of the site is not to give you a personalized answer, but to build a reference where the questions are useful to everyone

This is a strawman. Marking two different questions as duplicates of each other has nothing to do with a personalized answer, and answering both would absolutely be useful to everyone because a subset of visitors will look for answers to one question, and another subset will be looking for answers to the other question.

To emphasize the difference: Personalized answers would be about having a single question and giving different answers to different audiences. This is not at all the same as having two different _questions_.

>This is a strawman. Marking two different questions as duplicates of each other has nothing to do with a personalized answer, and answering both would absolutely be useful to everyone because a subset of visitors will look for answers to one question, and another subset will be looking for answers to the other question.

What you're missing: when a question is closed as a duplicate, the link to the duplicate target is automatically put at the top; furthermore, if there are no answers to the current question, logged-out users are automatically redirected to the target.

The goal of closing duplicates promptly is to prevent them from being answered and enable that redirect. As a result, people who search for the question and find a duplicate, actually find the target instead.

It's important here to keep in mind that the site's own search doesn't work very well, and external search doesn't understand the site's voting system. It happens all the time that poorly asked, hard-to-understand versions of a question nevertheless accidentally have better SEO. I know this because of years of experience trying to use external search to find a duplicate target for the N+1th iteration of the same basic question.

It is, in the common case, about personalized answers when people reject duplicates - because objectively the answers on the target answer their question and the OP is generally either refusing to accept this fact, refusing to accept that closing duplicates is part of our policy, or else is struggling to connect the answer to the question because of a failure to do the expected investigative work first (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/261592).

Should all 10,000 questions ( https://stackoverflow.com/questions/linked/218384?lq=1 ) that are duplicates of https://stackoverflow.com/questions/218384/what-is-a-nullpoi... be open and still allow people to try to answer each instance of the person's question?

The incentive is directing traffic to answers or questions of your profile ring. You can find plenty examples of question closed duplicate that brings you to a question asked later, plenty with an answer lifted from the original.

With all due respect, your (2 whole pages of) comments here are showing exactly the kind of in-group out-group aggression and defensiveness that I described, and it's that attitude that people are consistently complaining about. It's what started killing Stack Overflow long before LLMs.

Perhaps duplicates could be classified as useful (therefore SEO indexed and pointing to original) or noise (not indexable)

I genuinely don't understand what you're talking about. Should I not correct people when they say factually inaccurate things about a service I care about? Should I not point out that their use of a service is not aligned with the intended use of that service, or that a community already exists with differently aligned goals? Should I not point out that they are not in a position to override that community's purpose and vision?

Because I absolutely will not agree that other people should get to change what Stack Overflow is, simply because they think it should work like the other sites it was explicitly intended to provide an alternative to.

I'm trying my hardest here to be courteous and to consider all sides: the fact that the software doesn't work optimally for our goals; the fact that the site owners have unaligned interests (corporate ones around ad revenue and site traffic); the fact that key parts of the site software were poorly designed at the start and not properly re-evaluated and fixed (in particular, the reputation system, which saw only a passing attempt to invite meta-discussion and then no corresponding change); the fact that the site's UI affords misuse by looking too much like a discussion forum (compare and contrast Wikipedia: there's no sense that anyone is replying to anyone else except on the Talk and other meta pages, and the edit form is hidden behind a link).

For what it's worth, alternatives exist, and I prefer them. In particular, I use Codidact (https://www.codidact.com) and I consider that its design has fixed many problems with the Stack Exchange network. But fundamentally, these kinds of Q&A sites are meant to work a certain way in the main Q&A space (although Codidact opens up the possibility of parallel related spaces, not just meta). They are fundamentally and crucially not a place to just ask something because it's on your mind (or with the specific intent of getting out of a bind), without heed to existing questions, and hope that someone addresses you personally. That's how traditional forums work, and ultimately the cause of all the things that made experts fed up with them and motivated to try something new in 2008.

I've written a lot ITT because there are a lot of misconceptions about Stack Overflow out there, and many of them are quite popular; and because the site itself is not very good at presenting the needed correct information.

This. This is what I'm talking about. If you can't see it, nothing I will say can change it, but suffice it to say that I'm more convinced than ever that SO is culturally very sick.

I'll just refer back to the key relevant part of my initial post:

> A small core of contributors to a community resource invariably seems to develop a sense of "us against the world"—the thin blue line of police lore isn't an isolated thing, it's what happens when people view themselves as lone defenders of something they care about. And just like with police, that can result in a toxic culture that begins to actively degrade the plebian outgroup that they started out serving.

I don't necessarily think you've misidentified the culture. I disagree that it's sick. I think it's not only exactly what we want to have, but a huge improvement over what we started with in 2013-2014, when new question volume was peaking, curators and experts were getting increasingly frustrated, and the volume of discussion on meta exploded. (I've noticed that whenever I need to refer people to Q&A on meta that's our highest-quality meta content, to explain what Stack Overflow is, a large fraction of it is from 2014.)

In particular: we have always had what could broadly be called a code of conduct; it's become more refined and more like official codes of conduct over the years, for better or worse. But overall, over time, we've become much better at removing actually abusive, profane etc. comments, and editing off-handed details in questions to avoid giving needless offense. (By the way: a quite large fraction of curse words and insults come from new users who are upset at the realization that questions are subject to quality standards, or who take downvotes personally when we intend it purely as content rating.)

When I say that I don't understand, it's because you describe "in-group out-group aggression and defensiveness" and I don't see it that way. I'm not trying to protect other meta regulars. I'm trying to help people integrate by explaining to them how we want them to approach the site instead.

But it's impossible to do that without first informing people that their current approach is wrong, and trying to explain patiently why it's wrong.

> it's what happens when people view themselves as lone defenders of something they care about.

Because we actually, objectively are.

And what's wrong with that?

Why shouldn't we be able to have this thing?

And why should it be considered an invalid thing when e.g. Wikipedia is not?

If 29 million people want to use the "anyone can edit" property of Wikipedia to edit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog and ask whether Rover's condition is serious enough to require veterinary attention, does that invalidate Wikipedia's model?

> that begins to actively degrade the plebian outgroup that they started out serving.

Stack Overflow started in a closed beta and was marketed from the start as being for people with a certain level of cluefulness. We had to argue among ourselves to get everyone to accept that a) easy questions are not only fine, but often the most valuable and b) the thing that experts tend to hate about beginner questions is not the fact that they're beginner-level; it's literally every other consequence of a beginner asking them.

And acceptance of that is still not complete; sometimes long-standing members get yelled at on meta for trying to close good, easy questions because they're easy. And they, too, are acting against consensus, and against Stack Overflow's vision. (They're just, you know, nowhere near as troublesome overall as the long-standing members who don't care about policy and just try to answer as many questions as they can figure out an answer to.)

Stack Overflow was never intended to provide the kind of "service" that most newcomers (including newly arrived experts hoping to answer questions) expect. It was instead intended to show people that there's another way, that's fundamentally different from the traditional forum experience.

Hypothetically, if that was the case it doesn't cover the closing of questions that are not duplicates.

I would contend that the "close as something that you have an answer on" is less driven by "I want more votes on the answer" but rather "I know where to find this answer."

Alternatively, if the person didn't close it as an answer you would instead have the person copying and pasting the same answer into the new question - which would accomplish the same thing (more votes for your answers) and further fragment the "one place to look" ideal.

From the perspective of the site and curation of information, a given answer should appear in one and only one question. Closing a question as a duplicate serves to further that goal. Copying and pasting answers ( https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/320351/how-to-handl... ) to questions that would be duplicates is frowned upon. Diamond mods get such behavior raised to them as a system flag ( https://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/317988/ ) - "Duplicate answers (auto) - raised on each duplicate answer"

> The incentive is directing traffic to answers or questions of your profile ring. You can find plenty examples of question closed duplicate that brings you to a question asked later,

New Q&A of this sort generally gets written because people recognize that a question is commonly asked about some basic material, but nobody who actually needs the question answers (and thus asks it anew) ever manages to come up with a high-quality phrasing. For example, https://stackoverflow.com/questions/45621722 was intentionally crafted in 2017 to make it easier to direct beginners who have trivial issues with Python indentation to gain a basic understanding of how it's supposed to work. (There are a few key ways to get an IndentationError that aren't caused by general cluelessness; generally those are still duplicates, but should be directed somewhere else.) In 2023, I did some site searches and identified hundreds of old questions that are clearly low-quality duplicates - more beginners asking basic questions about Python indentation; there isn't enough daylight between them to consider them different, as the underlying conceptual difficulty is the same.

This has nothing to do with ego. I don't know the original author, "Chris", and have not otherwise knowingly interacted with that person. But I (and others) did extensively edit the question - to help make sure that other beginners can see their own problem in the question, and to help everyone - people with a more complex problem, and curators trying to point people in the right direction - to find other questions if they're more appropriate.

The fact that a duplicate target was asked later is generally considered irrelevant. We want people to find the best version of the question (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/258697, https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/404535). As a general principle, Stack Overflow curation doesn't care about when something was posted - only about how it holds up in the current moment.

> plenty with an answer lifted from the original.

Stack Overflow moderators take plagiarism very seriously. If you see a "lifted" answer anywhere on the site, please flag it.

For what it's worth, users with a gold badge are incentivized to close something as a duplicate if possible, rather than marking it as unclear, unfocused etc. even if those things are also true. This increases the chance that the OP gets some useful information anyway, and allows the curator to act unilaterally - avoiding the risk of someone trying to answer in the mean time.

In general, answering a question that you're actively curating is looked down upon on meta (it raises suspicion of vote fraud; and yes, moderators do care about that quite a bit, even if they recognize how broken the reputation system is) unless you've also asked the question intentionally as a canonical duplicate target (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/426205) and you're writing a new answer from scratch. And proper citations are required for anything you get from someone else - whether it's another SO answer or something elsewhere on the Internet.

Heh, I hadn't realized the infamous null pointer/reference question was that well cited. The most egregious cases in the Python tag only have about 3500 (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/20109391) and 1500 (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1373164/) links respectively.

... Okay, I want to walk back something I said in some other comments here. There is definitely a class of SO questions that get closed as duplicates inappropriately. I tend to forget about the first of the questions because it's not generally a suitable dupe target when it's used: it's a meta question, explaining how to fix your question, rather than actually answering it. But, as you might infer, that means your question should still be closed - it lacks debugging details.

I fought against this trend on meta: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/426205 . Unfortunately, there's another incentive misalignment here: dupe-hammering the question allows users with a gold badge to act more quickly on questions that don't meet site standards but are likely to attract a quick answer that interferes with keeping the site clean.

The second one... honestly probably isn't the best version of the question, but it's attracted good answers and become "canonical". The problem is that thinking in terms of "variable variables" isn't necessarily the right way to think about the problem (dynamically modifying namespaces; or rather, the fact that Python's namespaces are reflected as objects that can in most cases be modified meaningfully) - but it does map pretty well to how a beginner would typically think about the problem. It just tends to overlap with other reasonable questions in a messy way.

On Codidact, I've attempted to address the problem space more proactively, but I think I didn't complete the project I had in mind.

I also can't spell. Should have been 'employee', obviously.

Yes. And even Wikipedia was always open to be used for-profit.

https://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/262080/ has a data point in time when it could have been done...

> How much traffic do the questions that get duped to something bring? Especially the (currently) 410 questions linked to the Java NPE question. You get the couple of FGITW answers on it and the answer is over there, and closed to keep more people from trying to answer it (I hope the dup hammer is helping)... but now it's a closed question with 0 score, 100 views after a year... and five answers (one of which was accepted)... and no one will ever find it.

That was in 2014.

---

There are some misaligned incentives. There are probably people who dup vote to try to boost their reputation for some reason.

The problem (as I saw it) was that the tools of moderation and curation had too much friction and limits placed on them.

As the number of questions grew faster than the people who would curate them did, and the tools to curate them were diminished... you've got the problem of "there are two tools to curate and moderate left. One is to close the question. The other is to be a jerk to try to disincentivize the person from doing that again." I wrote about the second bit... a few years ago. Rudeness – the moderation tool of last resort -- https://shagie.net/2016/09/16/rudeness-the-moderation-tool-o...

Things like making it harder to not see low quality questions, or close them, or delete them...

> Thus rudeness and the attempt to drive an individual away because other moderation tools have run out or are ineffective. Rudeness is the moderation tool of last resort. When one sees the umteenth “how do I draw a pyramid with *” in the first week of classes on a programming site – how does one make it go away when the moderation tools have been fully exhausted? Be rude and hope that the next person seeing it won’t post the umteenth+1 one.

With respect to Stack Overflow, I believe that they've exhausted the people capable of doing moderating without rudeness and are now employees trying to moderate the core group rather than the core group empowered to moderate the site. Eventually, there will be no more left in the core group.

Other sites, with a narrower focus (e.g. GitHub discussions) are more able to handle the better focused questions and smaller user bases.

So I say that I wrote valid questions that got closed quickly, and your answer is "I'm happy to hear it"?

The fact of the matter is that, when doing research on all kinds of non-trivial issues, it's routine to come across a StackOverflow question about this exact thing that was erroneously closed as duplicate of something that it's not, and it's clear that the people who did close it didn't have the expertise to judge.

I'm sure mods well and truly believe that what they are doing is for the greater good, and I can even believe that the bulk of questions that are closed really are dupes etc. But there are a lot of babies getting thrown out with the bathwater even so, and the net result is that SO is less useful overall

The contributions are under CC-BY-SA, so while the company can legitimately profit from it, the ShareAlike part requires that derivative works are also distributed under the same license. This is the part that LLMs infringe upon, in my opinion. So, all I want is for OpenAI, Meta etc to release their model weights under CC-BY-SA, and then we're square.

You have literally responded to a person saying that their questions were closed very quickly without proper review with, "I'm happy to hear it. This is how it's supposed to work." (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43927524).

> because they're terribly asked and probably duplicates

Not all questions which seem duplicate to a non-expert are actual duplicates. An example question which took 2 lines to answer, then a page of text in that answer to restore the question after being closed as a duplicate: https://stackoverflow.com/q/65025858/

> The goal of closing duplicates promptly is to prevent them from being answered and enable that redirect. As a result, people who search for the question and find a duplicate, actually find the target instead.

Why would you want to prevent answers to a question, just because another unrelated question exists? Remember that the whole thread is not about actual duplicates, but about unrelated questions falsely marked as duplicates.

> ... because objectively the answers on the target answer their question ... > ... because of a failure to do the expected investigative work first ...

Almost everybody describing their experience with duplicates in this comment section tells the story of questions for which other questions have been found, linked from the supposedly-duplicate question, and described why the answers to that other question do NOT answer their own question.

The expected investigative work HAS been done; they explained why the other question is NOT a duplicate. The key point is that all of this has been ignored by the person closing the question.

Deal.

Say I ask "How to do X in settings.gradle?" and it is closed as a duplicate to "How to do X in build.gradle?". I know how to do X in build.gradle, I know it is not the same as doing X in settings.gradle (even if it's is twice the same X), and I know how to do X in settings.gradle (because I just had a need and found a solution without the help of StackOverflow). So I post an answer right away.

Can you explain the reasoning, or do you need it more concrete because you're absolutely sure you know better?

Because what's clear to me is that those (because it required multiple votes) who closed it as duplicate have no clue how it works. They obviously stopped at "X == X, it's a duplicate".

At some point I got into the habit of adding notes like "Note: it is not a duplicate of A because [...] and it is not a duplicate of B because [...]", which honestly made the question worse for those who actually understand it (just for the sake of pleasing those who would close it as duplicate). Spoiler: they closed it as a duplicate of A.

But stay happy in your world where you know everything, I'm not coming back anyway.

    > For it to be a truly democratic process there absolutely needs to be a way to withdraw consent from a moderator who behaves differently than expected.

This is a strange requirement to me. Do parliamentary democracies have this feature? I don't think so. And they are "truly democratic" in my book.

FYI: I have been part of SO.com for about 15 years. I am regular on both sides of the Q&A. Never once have I felt compelled to vote in any election on SO.com. The site admin is totally uninteresting to me.

Yes. I said that because that actually is the policy.

Review comes after the closure. This is the explicit and intentional design of the system. In other posts, I cited this (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/260263); not sure how that escaped from that post.

(To clarify, the entire point is that the closed state is the review period. It's temporary by design. And questions that are answerable may still not meet site standards, and can nearly always be improved. If I had my druthers, questions would start out closed.)

> Do parliamentary democracies have this feature? I don't think so. And they are "truly democratic" in my book.

I can't speak for all parliamentary elections, but in the UK MPs must be put to the vote at least once every 5 years, and in practice elections are called more frequently than that. I'm unsure what a system that elects for life but is still a democracy would look like: do you have ideas in mind?

No. You say that you wrote questions that you thought are "valid".

But everyone who writes a question thinks their questions are "valid", or they wouldn't post in the first place. You aren't the one who gets to decide whether a question meets the standards to stay open; when a question is closed, you are the one primarily responsible for fixing the problem identified with it.

And "valid" is not the standard: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/417476 I don't understand why, but the adjective "valid" seems to be very popular among people who complain about having their question closed. It has nothing to do with how our standards are written, though.

Speaking of which, you also claimed that the people who closed your questions had "no apparent reason other than 'those who reviewed it have no clue and think that it is invalid'". But this directly contradicts what you were told about the closure - I know this because there is a very small set of things you can be told by the system, and none of them matches that description. You have no evidence to back up that mindset; and, as far as I can tell, instead of trying to use the meta site and/or comments to get clarification, you assumed bad faith.

Questions are closed preemptively as an injunction against answers, not as a punishment, as I repeatedly explained throughout this thread. I've also more recently posted a reference question (with my own answer, among others) on the meta site explaining this to would-be answerers: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/429808 (Here I used the word "valid" in the title deliberately as an eye-catch, because I'm not just noticing the trend now.)

All of this happens because questions and answers are for everyone; it's not just about you as the poster. We're trying to maintain quality control for the benefit of countless future readers, not answering a question in the hopes that you, personally, have a better day programming experience as a result (typically referred to as "operating as a help desk" or similar on meta). We want everyone to have the experience of searching for an answer and directly getting one - not getting lost in someone else's conversation or spending time trying to figure out what they're talking about, or verifying that they're in the right place.

Because the latter experience has existed since the creation of phpBB, if not Usenet. And Stack Overflow was specifically borne out of frustration with it.

To "show a concrete example" I would need a question ID. (As I've explained in other posts, deletion is probably not a problem; deletion on Stack Overflow is normally "soft", and I have the reputation needed to see those posts.)

I'm not familiar with Gradle (I think that's a Java build system?), but if I saw what actually happened, I could probably understand well enough.

> Why would you want to prevent answers to a question, just because another unrelated question exists? Remember that the whole thread is not about actual duplicates, but about unrelated questions falsely marked as duplicates.

Here, for reference, is the entire sentence which kicked off the subthread where you objected to what I was saying:

> It is without merit ~90% of the time. The simple fact is that the "nuance" seen by the person asking the question is just not relevant to us, because the point of the site is not to give you a personalized answer, but to build a reference where the questions are useful to everyone.

In other words: I am defending "preventing answers to the question" for the exact reason that it probably actually really is a duplicate, according to how we view duplicates. As a reminder, this is in terms of what future users of the site will find the most useful. It is not simply in terms of what the question author thinks.

And in my years-long experience seeing appeals, in a large majority of cases it really is a duplicate; it really is clearly a duplicate; and the only apparent reason the OP is objecting is because it takes additional effort to adapt the answers to the exact situation motivating the original question. And I absolutely have seen this sort of "effort" boil down to things like a need to rename the variables instead of just literally copying and pasting the code. Quite often.

> Almost everybody describing their experience with duplicates in this comment section tells the story of questions for which other questions have been found, linked from the supposedly-duplicate question, and described why the answers to that other question do NOT answer their own question.

No, they do not. They describe the experience of believing that the other question is different. They don't even mention the answers on the other question. And there is nowhere near enough detail in the description to evaluate the reasoning out of context.

This is, as I described in other comments, why there is a meta site.

And this is HN. The average result elsewhere on the Internet has been worse.

Well, that's unless their derivative works fall under fair use?

> I'm not familiar with [...] but if I saw what actually happened, I could probably understand well enough.

That's probably exactly what those who closed it thought: "I'm not familiar with it, but I'm certainly a better judge than the person who is working with it".

Do you realise that you are going around telling everybody who complains about the StackOverflow moderation that they were certainly wrong, and StackOverflow was certainly right, and if they showed you the specific question you could certainly teach them why they are wrong? That would be the first step to understanding why people don't really enjoy your behaviour.

>Do you realise that you are going around telling everybody who complains about the StackOverflow moderation that they were certainly wrong, and StackOverflow was certainly right, and if they showed you the specific question you could certainly teach them why they are wrong?

No. s/certainly/probably/g.

And I say this because I have a large amount of evidence - from cases where I was a subject matter expert - that the overwhelming majority of these cases turn out to be ones in which the proposed duplicate was very obviously a duplicate.

People really will go up to you and tell you straight faced that no, this is a completely different situation because of a detail that is in fact completely irrelevant to the problem. And that the answers on the duplicate won't work, when they haven't tried. And I've had it happen that I can show these people directly that the answers actually do work in their case.

I'm sure that's the legislation they will lobby through if the courts don't play ball. But from a purely ethical standpoint I find it repugnant when people like Sam Altman take something that is offered for free specifically with the intent that it benefits the commons, and make a commercial enterprise out of it.

> But this directly contradicts what you were told about the closure - I know this because there is a very small set of things you can be told by the system, and none of them matches that description

Do you know that below the question, there is a space dedicated to comments? You seem to spend a lot of time on SO, I would assume you know it.

> And I say this because I have a large amount of evidence - from cases where I was a subject matter expert - that the overwhelming majority of these cases turn out to be ones in which the proposed duplicate was very obviously a duplicate.

I think you miss something basic here. Nobody is saying "no question should ever be closed as a duplicate". What I am saying, is that I have had many of my own questions, where I was an SME, that were closed as duplicate where in fact they were not duplicates and the answers on the "duplicate" were not even applicable. By "many" I mean "enough for me to consider StackOverflow moderation toxic and leaving.

Because many questions are actually duplicates doesn't mean that all are duplicates. But you don't seem to be even remotely open to the idea that it can ever happen that a question is wrongly closed as a duplicate. Again, I have had questions closed where I listed the "similar questions" suggested by SO and explained why they were not duplicates. Do you think the moderators would have discussed it with me? It felt like they didn't even read my question entirely because in some cases I can't get how someone who knows how to read may ignore my "warning: this is not a duplicate of X because [...]".

> They are curation actions taken by members of the community

A community which has, according to the tons of comments here, become toxic.