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

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.

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.

> 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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

> 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/

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.

> 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.