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I can see how frustrating it might be, but the overall idea of SO is "no duplicates". They don't want to have 1000 questions which are exactly the same but with

I can see how frustrating it might be, but the overall idea of SO is "no duplicates". They don't want to have 1000 questions which are exactly the same but with slightly different phrasing. It can be problematic for total newcomers, but at the same time it makes it more useful for professionals: instead of having 1000 questions how to X with 1 reply, you have one canonical question with 20 replies sorted by upvotes and you can quickly see which one is likely the best. FWIW, I found LLMs to be actually really good at those basic questions where I'm at expert at language X and I ask how to do similar thing in Y, using Y's terms (which might be named differently in X). I believe this actually would work well: - extra basic things, or things that depend on opinion etc: ask LLMs and let they infer and steer you - advanced / off the beaten path questions that LLMs hallucinate on: ask on SO

noirscape 2y ago
The problem SO tends to run into is when you have a question that seems like it answers another question on the surface (ie. because the question title is bad) and then a very different question is closed with the dupe reason pointing to that question because the close titles are similar. Since there's no way to appeal duplicate close votes on SO until you have a pretty large amount of rep, this kinda creates a problem where there's a "silent mass" of duplicate questions that aren't really duplicates. A basic example is this question: https://stackoverflow.com/q/27957454 https://stackoverflow.com/q/27957454 , which is about disabling PRs on GitHub on the surface. The body text however reveals that the poster is instead asking how they can set up branch permissions and get certain accounts to bypass them. I can already assure you that just by basic searching, this question will pop up first when you look up disabling PRs, and the accepted answer answers the question body (which means that it's almost certain a different question has been closed as a duplicate of this one), rather than the question title. You could give a more informative answer (which kinda happened here), but this is technically off-topic to the question being closed. That's where SO gets it's bad rep for inaccurate duplicate closing from.
- nicolas_t 2y ago
  The other problem is that you'll get a duplicate but the duplicate question's answers are all outdated.
bryanrasmussen 2y ago
>I can see how frustrating it might be It's certainly not frustrating for me, I ask a question maybe once a year on SO, most of their content is, in my chosen disciplines, not technically interesting, it is no better than looking up code snippets in documentation (which most of the time is what it really, really is) I suppose it's frustrating for SO that people no longer find it worthwhile to ask questions there. >advanced / off the beaten path show me an advanced and off the beaten path question that SO has answered well, that is just not worth the effort to try to get an answer - if you have an advanced and off the beaten path question that you can't answer then you ask it on SO just "in case" but really you will find the answer somewhere else or not at all in my experience.

noirscape 2y ago

The problem SO tends to run into is when you have a question that seems like it answers another question on the surface (ie. because the question title is bad) and then a very different question is closed with the dupe reason pointing to that question because the close titles are similar. Since there's no way to appeal duplicate close votes on SO until you have a pretty large amount of rep, this kinda creates a problem where there's a "silent mass" of duplicate questions that aren't really duplicates. A basic example is this question: https://stackoverflow.com/q/27957454 https://stackoverflow.com/q/27957454 , which is about disabling PRs on GitHub on the surface. The body text however reveals that the poster is instead asking how they can set up branch permissions and get certain accounts to bypass them. I can already assure you that just by basic searching, this question will pop up first when you look up disabling PRs, and the accepted answer answers the question body (which means that it's almost certain a different question has been closed as a duplicate of this one), rather than the question title. You could give a more informative answer (which kinda happened here), but this is technically off-topic to the question being closed. That's where SO gets it's bad rep for inaccurate duplicate closing from.

nicolas_t 2y ago
The other problem is that you'll get a duplicate but the duplicate question's answers are all outdated.

bryanrasmussen 2y ago

>I can see how frustrating it might be It's certainly not frustrating for me, I ask a question maybe once a year on SO, most of their content is, in my chosen disciplines, not technically interesting, it is no better than looking up code snippets in documentation (which most of the time is what it really, really is) I suppose it's frustrating for SO that people no longer find it worthwhile to ask questions there. >advanced / off the beaten path show me an advanced and off the beaten path question that SO has answered well, that is just not worth the effort to try to get an answer - if you have an advanced and off the beaten path question that you can't answer then you ask it on SO just "in case" but really you will find the answer somewhere else or not at all in my experience.