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I left SO because I was downvoted to oblivion for an answer that took me 2 minutes to write - but I had answered a similar question several years before (which
by hans_castorp 3y ago
I left SO because I was downvoted to oblivion for an answer that took me 2 minutes to write - but I had answered a similar question several years before (which I actually didn't remember). Searching for my own answer would have taken way more time than it took to write a new one.
When I pointed out that it's not the responsibility of the one answering to search for dupes, but for the one asking, I was told that I should still invest the time or otherwise don't answer at all.
- rmbyrro 3y agoThat's why most developers now prefer ChatGPT. It's way faster and more convenient. Like a super smart search engine. SO will remain as a library for unseen problems, which is what's supposed to be good for.
- mewse 3y agoI'd also like to highlight "non-hostile" as a reason why folks might prefer ChatGPT. Stack Overflow has a lot of stridently opinionated jerks contributing to it, and if I can just ask ChatGPT a question and get an answer that works rather than having to deal with being belittled by those people, then I'm probably having a much better day as a result.
- pasc1878 3y agoYes especially if you know you have answered the same thing before. You look for your original. Remember all users are moderators. There are some explicit moderators but they don"t close or downvote often they deal with other problems - or on smaller sites just use normal user powers to vote and close.
- metabagel 3y agoOK, but the person you’re replying to left SO over this policy, and you didn’t seem to register that at all, just repeated the policy. The fault finding culture of SO is toxic.
- pasc1878 3y agoThen SO's reasonms for this policy need to be explained more. The aim of SO is to provide answers to a question. You do not want many questions with the same answer as if you have a new answer or a comment on this duplicate answer you need to then add it to all the questions. Thus we want to collapse all these multiple questions into one. Also the person who I was replying to did noit seem to understand that they were a moderator, moderators are not a separate set of people to users.
- captaincaveman 3y agoThey are a user, they choose to moderate or not, forcing people in this way to contribute only in a very specific way means, less users ...
- pasc1878 3y agoBut better more consistent data - which is what I want from SO. However SO Inc wants money and so more users.
- _wf2l 3y agocitation needed that it actually provides better more consistent data. all it leads to is a flood of closed articles in Google search results. no curation whatsoever
- pasc1878 3y agoIf a question is closed as a duplicate it provides a link to the question it is a duplicate of and you can see the answer there. You can"t expect the answerer to answer each individual question which is the same, especially as the answer might have been given over 10 yuears ago? What do you expect a good answerer to do with a question asked for the hundredth time?