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

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.

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.

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

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.

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"

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.

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.