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Many people mention they avoid commenting on downvoted questions for fear of the wrath of the asker. People seem to feel differently about close voting, perhaps

Many people mention they avoid commenting on downvoted questions for fear of the wrath of the asker. People seem to feel differently about close voting, perhaps since they are collected and presented as a group. I don't really get the point of the vigilance toward bad but not intentionally spam questions. The question # has been used, derank it and call it a day until someone sees a reason to revive it.or the asker ASKS for help improving their question.

jrumbut 7y ago
The specific change I would like to see is to really raise the bar on what is considered a duplicate. I think a rule could be "if someone with a decent track record (for some definition of decent, maybe 100 points? 1000?) felt the need to ask it, it's not a duplicate." The bar could be raised in other ways as well, but this one I think would reward people who have done the work to be a positive part of the community. We all have varying degrees of ability to generalize the principle of one answer to another. The other part of this is that you get better at asking questions through practice, which is hard to get early on. At this point, most problems I can't answer are good questions or too specific, but it took a while and I don't want SO to be the place where only those with 5-10 years in can get help.
- yabadabadoes 7y ago
  It seems to me like someone with few points is least likely to understand a solution to a duplicate of their problem.. I don't really see the harm in linking it and still letting people answer or comment on the proxied solution. SE spends half the time saying an overlapping diversity makes it easy to find a question and answer that fits and the other half eliminating that diversity (and bringing non-adept people to dead ends in their searches that land on SO.)
  - jrumbut 7y ago
    My proposal is intentionally moderate. If I had my way, I'd go further, but this is something I've thought about and think it may be palatable to those at SO who want to preserve the strictness and maintain respect for those who contribute. You still have to put in a lot of work to figure out how things work, but if you do the work you get credibility. I see it as a way to meet in the middle.
- Bnshsysjab 7y ago
  I also think being able to override votes to nuke an incorrect answer would be handy, I recently begun getting involved in HTML/CSS for a somewhat obscure project, some of the older answers around front end topics are extremely dated and incorrect by today’s standards (flexbox, for example, deprecates a bunch of hacks). Sure there might be the correct response 3-4 answers down, but I shouldn’t need to dig for that.
  - chc 7y ago
    IMO the outdated info problem is the biggest one Stack Overflow has right now, much worse than posts getting flagged as dupes on a questionable basis. Theoretically, you're just supposed to add a new answer that's better — but you almost certainly won't get the checkmark, and you probably won't even get more votes than the old answer (since your answer will only get search traffic and not front-page traffic, and you're already below all the other answers to begin with). So Stack Overflow slowly transforms into w3schools.

jrumbut 7y ago

The specific change I would like to see is to really raise the bar on what is considered a duplicate. I think a rule could be "if someone with a decent track record (for some definition of decent, maybe 100 points? 1000?) felt the need to ask it, it's not a duplicate." The bar could be raised in other ways as well, but this one I think would reward people who have done the work to be a positive part of the community. We all have varying degrees of ability to generalize the principle of one answer to another. The other part of this is that you get better at asking questions through practice, which is hard to get early on. At this point, most problems I can't answer are good questions or too specific, but it took a while and I don't want SO to be the place where only those with 5-10 years in can get help.

yabadabadoes 7y ago
It seems to me like someone with few points is least likely to understand a solution to a duplicate of their problem.. I don't really see the harm in linking it and still letting people answer or comment on the proxied solution. SE spends half the time saying an overlapping diversity makes it easy to find a question and answer that fits and the other half eliminating that diversity (and bringing non-adept people to dead ends in their searches that land on SO.)
- jrumbut 7y ago
  My proposal is intentionally moderate. If I had my way, I'd go further, but this is something I've thought about and think it may be palatable to those at SO who want to preserve the strictness and maintain respect for those who contribute. You still have to put in a lot of work to figure out how things work, but if you do the work you get credibility. I see it as a way to meet in the middle.
Bnshsysjab 7y ago
I also think being able to override votes to nuke an incorrect answer would be handy, I recently begun getting involved in HTML/CSS for a somewhat obscure project, some of the older answers around front end topics are extremely dated and incorrect by today’s standards (flexbox, for example, deprecates a bunch of hacks). Sure there might be the correct response 3-4 answers down, but I shouldn’t need to dig for that.
- chc 7y ago
  IMO the outdated info problem is the biggest one Stack Overflow has right now, much worse than posts getting flagged as dupes on a questionable basis. Theoretically, you're just supposed to add a new answer that's better — but you almost certainly won't get the checkmark, and you probably won't even get more votes than the old answer (since your answer will only get search traffic and not front-page traffic, and you're already below all the other answers to begin with). So Stack Overflow slowly transforms into w3schools.