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> Having duplicates of the question is precisely why people use LLMs instead of StackOverflow. The majority of all users lack the vocabulary to properly articul

by zahlman 10mo ago

> Having duplicates of the question is precisely why people use LLMs instead of StackOverflow. The majority of all users lack the vocabulary to properly articulate their problems using the jargon of mathematicians and programmers. Yes; so the idea is they fail to find the existing question, and ask it again, and get marked as a duplicate; and then everyone else with the same problem can search, possibly find the new duplicate version, and get automatically redirected to the main version with high quality answers.

zarzavat 10mo ago
Yes but that only works if the questions are identical. Often however they are merely similar, but closed as duplicates nonetheless.
- zahlman 10mo ago
  No, that is completely wrong. It is exactly because the questions are not identical that the system works. That is what allows for multiple versions of a popular, important question to catch attention from search engines, and send everyone to the same, correct place. Perhaps your objection is that, because the target question is not literally identical (for example, maybe a code sample has different variable names, or the setup has an irrelevant difference in the container type used for a collection, etc.) that the answers don't literally answer the new version of the question. That is completely missing the point. It's not a forum. The Q&A format is just the way that information is being presented. Fixing the issue in your, personal code is not, and never has been, the goal.
  - gyan 10mo ago
    You are positing that only questions with cosmetic or extraneous differences are marked as duplicates. That's not the case. As a maintainer of a popular project who has engaged with thousands of Qs on SO related to that project, I've seen many Qs marked as duplicate where the actual answer would be different in a non-trivial manner. When I look at who all moderated on those Qs, they are usually users who haven't contributed to that topic at SO.
    - zahlman 10mo ago
      > That's not the case. Yes, it is. I have been active on both the main and meta sites for many years. I have seen so many of these complaints and they overwhelmingly boil down to that. And I have gotten so unbelievably stressed out on so many occasions trying to explain to people why their trivial objections are missing the point of the site completely. > I've seen many Qs marked as duplicate where the actual answer would be different in a non-trivial manner. Please feel free to cite specific examples. I'll be happy to explain policy. > When I look at who all moderated on those Qs, they are usually users who haven't contributed to that topic at SO. That is generally irrelevant.
      - gyan 10mo ago
        > Please feel free to cite specific examples. I'll be happy to explain policy. How do I search for Qs closed as duplicates with a certain tag?
        zahlman 10mo ago
        "[tag] is:question duplicate:yes" But if you had a personal experience, it will be easier to look within your questions on your profile page.
        gyan 10mo ago
        > But if you had a personal experience, it will be easier to look within your questions on your profile page. I answer Qs on this topic, not post them. ---- Here's an example I found: https://superuser.com/questions/1929615/ https://superuser.com/questions/1929615/ (the canonical q is about extracting as mono, the closed q is about muting one channel)
        zahlman 10mo ago
        You appear to have linked the canonical, which has a few duplicates marked. All are asking about isolating one channel, as far as I can tell. This canonical is literally titled "ffmpeg: isolate one audio channel". One of them also asks about "downmixing" to mono after isolating the channel (which I guess means marking the audio format as mono so that that isolated channel will play on both speakers), but that is trivial. And you see the same basic techniques offered in the answers: to use `-map-channel` or the `pan` audio filter. The other one explicitly wants a panned result, i.e. still stereo but only on one side; the logic for this is clear from the explanation in the canonical answer. The point is to show the technique, not to meet individual exact needs. Stack Overflow doesn't need separate "how do I get the second line of a file?" and "how do I get the third line of a file?" questions.
lurk2 10mo ago
> Yes; so the idea is they fail to find the existing question, and ask it again, and get marked as a duplicate Users would fail to find the existing question not because there was an abundance of poorly-worded questions, but because there was a dearth of questions asked using lay terminology that the user was likely to use. Users were not searching for error codes but making naive preliminary searches like “XYZ doesn’t work” and then branching off from there. Having answers worded in a variety of ways allowed for greater odds that the user would find a question written the way he had worded his search. Redirecting users to an older answer also just added pointless friction compared to allowing for the answer from the original question to be reposted on the duplicate question, in the exceedingly rare instances I understand the motive behind wanting to exclude questions that are effectively just: “Do my work for me.” The issue is you have users actively telling you that the culling process didn’t really work the way it was supposed to, and you keep telling them that they are wrong, and that the site actually works well for its intended purpose—even though its intended purpose was to help users find what they were looking for, and they are telling you that they can’t. Part of StackOverflow’s decline was inevitable and wouldn’t have been helped by any changes the site administrators could have made; a machine can simply answer questions a lot faster than a collection of human volunteers. But there is a reason people were so eager to leave. So now instead of conforming to what users repeatedly told the administrators that they wanted, StackOverflow can conform to being the repository of questions that the administrators wanted, just without any users or revenue besides selling the contributions made by others to the LLMs that users have demonstrated they actually want to use.

by zahlman 10mo ago

zarzavat 10mo ago

Yes but that only works if the questions are identical. Often however they are merely similar, but closed as duplicates nonetheless.

zahlman 10mo ago
No, that is completely wrong. It is exactly because the questions are not identical that the system works. That is what allows for multiple versions of a popular, important question to catch attention from search engines, and send everyone to the same, correct place. Perhaps your objection is that, because the target question is not literally identical (for example, maybe a code sample has different variable names, or the setup has an irrelevant difference in the container type used for a collection, etc.) that the answers don't literally answer the new version of the question. That is completely missing the point. It's not a forum. The Q&A format is just the way that information is being presented. Fixing the issue in your, personal code is not, and never has been, the goal.
- gyan 10mo ago
  You are positing that only questions with cosmetic or extraneous differences are marked as duplicates. That's not the case. As a maintainer of a popular project who has engaged with thousands of Qs on SO related to that project, I've seen many Qs marked as duplicate where the actual answer would be different in a non-trivial manner. When I look at who all moderated on those Qs, they are usually users who haven't contributed to that topic at SO.
  - zahlman 10mo ago
    > That's not the case. Yes, it is. I have been active on both the main and meta sites for many years. I have seen so many of these complaints and they overwhelmingly boil down to that. And I have gotten so unbelievably stressed out on so many occasions trying to explain to people why their trivial objections are missing the point of the site completely. > I've seen many Qs marked as duplicate where the actual answer would be different in a non-trivial manner. Please feel free to cite specific examples. I'll be happy to explain policy. > When I look at who all moderated on those Qs, they are usually users who haven't contributed to that topic at SO. That is generally irrelevant.
    - gyan 10mo ago
      > Please feel free to cite specific examples. I'll be happy to explain policy. How do I search for Qs closed as duplicates with a certain tag?
      - zahlman 10mo ago
        "[tag] is:question duplicate:yes" But if you had a personal experience, it will be easier to look within your questions on your profile page.
        gyan 10mo ago
        > But if you had a personal experience, it will be easier to look within your questions on your profile page. I answer Qs on this topic, not post them. ---- Here's an example I found: https://superuser.com/questions/1929615/ https://superuser.com/questions/1929615/ (the canonical q is about extracting as mono, the closed q is about muting one channel)
        zahlman 10mo ago
        You appear to have linked the canonical, which has a few duplicates marked. All are asking about isolating one channel, as far as I can tell. This canonical is literally titled "ffmpeg: isolate one audio channel". One of them also asks about "downmixing" to mono after isolating the channel (which I guess means marking the audio format as mono so that that isolated channel will play on both speakers), but that is trivial. And you see the same basic techniques offered in the answers: to use `-map-channel` or the `pan` audio filter. The other one explicitly wants a panned result, i.e. still stereo but only on one side; the logic for this is clear from the explanation in the canonical answer. The point is to show the technique, not to meet individual exact needs. Stack Overflow doesn't need separate "how do I get the second line of a file?" and "how do I get the third line of a file?" questions.

lurk2 10mo ago

> Yes; so the idea is they fail to find the existing question, and ask it again, and get marked as a duplicate Users would fail to find the existing question not because there was an abundance of poorly-worded questions, but because there was a dearth of questions asked using lay terminology that the user was likely to use. Users were not searching for error codes but making naive preliminary searches like “XYZ doesn’t work” and then branching off from there. Having answers worded in a variety of ways allowed for greater odds that the user would find a question written the way he had worded his search. Redirecting users to an older answer also just added pointless friction compared to allowing for the answer from the original question to be reposted on the duplicate question, in the exceedingly rare instances I understand the motive behind wanting to exclude questions that are effectively just: “Do my work for me.” The issue is you have users actively telling you that the culling process didn’t really work the way it was supposed to, and you keep telling them that they are wrong, and that the site actually works well for its intended purpose—even though its intended purpose was to help users find what they were looking for, and they are telling you that they can’t. Part of StackOverflow’s decline was inevitable and wouldn’t have been helped by any changes the site administrators could have made; a machine can simply answer questions a lot faster than a collection of human volunteers. But there is a reason people were so eager to leave. So now instead of conforming to what users repeatedly told the administrators that they wanted, StackOverflow can conform to being the repository of questions that the administrators wanted, just without any users or revenue besides selling the contributions made by others to the LLMs that users have demonstrated they actually want to use.