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

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

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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

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 :-)

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 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.

> 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.

> 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?

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.

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.

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.

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).

> 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?

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.

> 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.

> 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.