5 ms·

This is a really good point - people seem to get hung up about questions being closed, even though "closed as duplicate" is a win since it means somebody alread

• DanBC 8y ago
  > even though "closed as duplicate" is a win since it means somebody already answered your question. That's only a win if the duplicate is real. Sometimes questions are closed when they aren't really duplicates.
  • olavk 8y ago
    Yes that is bad. You can vote to reopen if you have enough rep.
    • Bartweiss 8y ago
      > if you have enough rep. This is a substantial part of the fighting over the site, though - there are lengthy guides to picking up enough Stack Overflow rep to render the site usable. I usually see this dismissed with "just help some people and ask some good questions, you'll be there in no time", but when I talk to friends who are getting a self-taught start with programming, I consistently hear a different story. They're getting questions closed as dupes, either because they aren't experienced enough to recognize duplicate questions with different terms or because mods are squelching their genuinely novel questions. And they're new, so they can't answer hard questions - and the easy ones don't produce rep because they're inevitably closed, removing all the payouts for answering them. I understand the logic behind the rep gating system, it's not a bad idea. But it's just fuel on the fire when things go wrong, and they go wrong a lot in the form of wrongly closed questions.
      • olavk 8y ago
        Yes it is hard to ask good questions, especially when you are just starting with a technology and lack the proper terminology and mental model - which is the phase where you need to ask the most questions!
        • Bartweiss 8y ago
          Yeah - I don't mean to imply this is all Stack Overflow's problem! I think more could be done, but the 'unknown unknowns' situations is really hard to provide support for with anything short of sitting down one-on-one and working through the topic.
• wyldfire 8y ago
  They changed "closed" to refer instead to "on hold" and IMO it did not make a big difference.
• Bartweiss 8y ago
  > If you just called it "promoted to FAQ" or something... In all but one of the cases where I've had questions closed as duplicates, I would have found this actively insulting. That's because all but one of those closures linked to non-duplicates, and in some cases to questions I had already singled out as not applying to my situation. It's honestly a pretty hard to solve problem, because you're trapped by opposing forces. The sunnier the framing, the less it will sting the people asking the (numerous) duplicate questions - but the more it will irritate people who think (rightly or wrongly) that it's been done in error. My SO experience seems to have been nonstandard, but it's always looked to me like changing labels and appearances is going to go bust because the rate of actual bad decisions and meanness by power users is too high to build trust.
• s73v3r_ 8y ago
  I believe the reason people get hung up on that is because, many times, the "duplicate" isn't actually a duplicate.
  • olavk 8y ago
    Can you provide a few links to examples? I will vote to reopen if appropriate.