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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 projec

by gyan 9mo 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 9mo 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 9mo 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 9mo 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 9mo 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 9mo 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.
        gyan 9mo ago
        The dupe is what I linked. The orig is https://superuser.com/questions/601972 https://superuser.com/questions/601972 The orig wants a mono output with one of the original channels as signal source. This involves downmixing i.e. rematrixing the audio. The dupe want to just mute one of the channels, not repan it. One can't apply map_channel to do what the dupe wants. One can use a couple of methods to achieve the dupe, including pan. But the syntax of pan needed for the dupe case is not the same as the orig, or deducible from it. They need to consult the docs (fortuitously, the dupe case is an illustrated example) or get a direct answer. The 'technique' shown in the orig is not intuitively adaptable to the dupe - one needs to know about the implicit muting that pan applies, which is not documented or evident in the orig answer. So it's not a duplicate of the source Q.
        zahlman 9mo ago
        > The dupe is what I linked. The orig is Ah, I don't actually have a SuperUser account, so it was automatically redirecting me. > The 'technique' shown in the orig is not intuitively adaptable to the dupe IDK, it looks to me like I could figure it out pretty easily from what's written there, and I'm not by any means an ffmpeg expert.
- wpietri 9mo ago
  Have you considered that the problem here is not insufficient explanation of policy? There's this thing that some programmers do a lot, where it's the users who are wrong. Using it wrong, approaching it wrong, thinking about it wrong, wanting the wrong thing. Just not understanding enough the masterwork that the programmers created. What this view misses is that the users are the point. If one user gets it wrong, sure, maybe it's the user. But broadly the point of software is to serve and adapt to users, and developers who forget that are starting an argument that they cannot win in the long term. It's especially wild to see you talking like this on an article about how Stack Overflow is just about dead. It needed changes a decade ago, but everyone just hunkered down and defended the existing approach. The policies you are somehow still defending are a big part of what doomed the site.
  - shagie 9mo ago
    The site was a consensus of what Jeff and Joel and their associated blogging communities who started posting on Stack Overflow wanted. There was some tension between those two communities about what should be there, but that's where it started. In the early days, onboarding was done fairly actively with a reasonable amount of the community participating in answering and community moderation - shaping it. That portion of the community - both answering and moderating was key for onboarding. However, as Stack Overflow got popular, a smaller and smaller percent of the community was actively answering and participating in community moderation - and onboarding of new people became more and more difficult. Here I lay the responsibility nearly completely at the feet of corporate. The friction for moderation was increased at the same time that it became popular and thus harder for the community to moderate. Making it easier moderate and help people understand the site meant that either you needed a larger part of the now very large number of people participating on the site or the ease of community moderation needed to be dialed back. This is also where rudeness became more and more common. There are two parts to this - first rudeness takes no points to get to that level of moderation. It doesn't have any limited pool of votes that you deplete. Secondly, not everything was rude. With the smaller and smaller pool of community moderation people were shorter in their attempts to onboard a person. You couldn't write a paragraph in a comment and spend 10 minutes on one person when spending 1 minute on 10 different people was more likely to help someone. The shortness of responses was interpreted by the person asking was being perceived as rude. Lastly, StackOverflow was designed as a Q&A site and attempted to minimize some of the things that were seen as failings described in A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23723205 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23723205 ) - Clay Shirky was a mentor of Jeff and was on the original Stack Overflow board. It tried (and for a long time succeeded at) handling scale... though when Stack Overflow's ability to handle scale failed, it was the moderation tools and the ability for the people participating in community moderation to help surface the good questions to be answered and have the questions that needed work to be properly answerable in the Q&A format that Stack Overflow was designed around (not in a forum format) that suffered.
- dxdm 9mo ago
  I do not remember any specific examples, but when I still used SO, I've come across many cases personally where a question closely matching a problem I had was closed as a duplicate of another question that asked about a related, but different problem and had an answer that was not appropriate for my problem and the supposedly duplicate question. This significantly decreased the utility of clicking on SO links for me, to the point where I would avoid going to search results from SO first. The comments here are teeming with others voicing similar experiences. It is quite... something to read your response to this, which pretty much comes across as "nu-uh!", garnished with an appeal to "policy". I think your SO-specific bubble is a little different from most other people's. I've no doubt that overwhelmingly, the dupes are dupes, but on the other hand, the false positives you're discounting are overwhelming the user experience.
  - zahlman 9mo ago
    > many cases personally where a question closely matching a problem I had was closed as a duplicate of another question that asked about a related, but different problem and had an answer that was not appropriate for my problem and the supposedly duplicate question. Yes. We consider that duplicate. Because the point is whether the question is duplicate, not whether the problem is duplicate. The point is not to solve the problem, so it isn't interesting whether the question is "appropriate to" the problem. The point is to give you the information you need.
    - dxdm 9mo ago
      I don't understand how you can read all this and conclude that people get the information they need. In fact, your latest response is so far out that I've started to seriously wonder if you're trying to troll. If you aren't: sorry, just trying to tell you how this comes across as absurdly disconnected. If you are: you're bad at trolling, or a master at satire. Either way, I'm outta here.
    - AngryData 9mo ago
      How does "give you the information you need" mesh with "The point is not to solve the problem"? They seem like mutually exclusive goals for 95% of cases.

by gyan 9mo ago

zahlman 9mo 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 9mo 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 9mo 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 9mo 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 9mo 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.
      - gyan 9mo ago
        The dupe is what I linked. The orig is https://superuser.com/questions/601972 https://superuser.com/questions/601972 The orig wants a mono output with one of the original channels as signal source. This involves downmixing i.e. rematrixing the audio. The dupe want to just mute one of the channels, not repan it. One can't apply map_channel to do what the dupe wants. One can use a couple of methods to achieve the dupe, including pan. But the syntax of pan needed for the dupe case is not the same as the orig, or deducible from it. They need to consult the docs (fortuitously, the dupe case is an illustrated example) or get a direct answer. The 'technique' shown in the orig is not intuitively adaptable to the dupe - one needs to know about the implicit muting that pan applies, which is not documented or evident in the orig answer. So it's not a duplicate of the source Q.
        zahlman 9mo ago
        > The dupe is what I linked. The orig is Ah, I don't actually have a SuperUser account, so it was automatically redirecting me. > The 'technique' shown in the orig is not intuitively adaptable to the dupe IDK, it looks to me like I could figure it out pretty easily from what's written there, and I'm not by any means an ffmpeg expert.
wpietri 9mo ago
Have you considered that the problem here is not insufficient explanation of policy? There's this thing that some programmers do a lot, where it's the users who are wrong. Using it wrong, approaching it wrong, thinking about it wrong, wanting the wrong thing. Just not understanding enough the masterwork that the programmers created. What this view misses is that the users are the point. If one user gets it wrong, sure, maybe it's the user. But broadly the point of software is to serve and adapt to users, and developers who forget that are starting an argument that they cannot win in the long term. It's especially wild to see you talking like this on an article about how Stack Overflow is just about dead. It needed changes a decade ago, but everyone just hunkered down and defended the existing approach. The policies you are somehow still defending are a big part of what doomed the site.
- shagie 9mo ago
  The site was a consensus of what Jeff and Joel and their associated blogging communities who started posting on Stack Overflow wanted. There was some tension between those two communities about what should be there, but that's where it started. In the early days, onboarding was done fairly actively with a reasonable amount of the community participating in answering and community moderation - shaping it. That portion of the community - both answering and moderating was key for onboarding. However, as Stack Overflow got popular, a smaller and smaller percent of the community was actively answering and participating in community moderation - and onboarding of new people became more and more difficult. Here I lay the responsibility nearly completely at the feet of corporate. The friction for moderation was increased at the same time that it became popular and thus harder for the community to moderate. Making it easier moderate and help people understand the site meant that either you needed a larger part of the now very large number of people participating on the site or the ease of community moderation needed to be dialed back. This is also where rudeness became more and more common. There are two parts to this - first rudeness takes no points to get to that level of moderation. It doesn't have any limited pool of votes that you deplete. Secondly, not everything was rude. With the smaller and smaller pool of community moderation people were shorter in their attempts to onboard a person. You couldn't write a paragraph in a comment and spend 10 minutes on one person when spending 1 minute on 10 different people was more likely to help someone. The shortness of responses was interpreted by the person asking was being perceived as rude. Lastly, StackOverflow was designed as a Q&A site and attempted to minimize some of the things that were seen as failings described in A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23723205 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23723205 ) - Clay Shirky was a mentor of Jeff and was on the original Stack Overflow board. It tried (and for a long time succeeded at) handling scale... though when Stack Overflow's ability to handle scale failed, it was the moderation tools and the ability for the people participating in community moderation to help surface the good questions to be answered and have the questions that needed work to be properly answerable in the Q&A format that Stack Overflow was designed around (not in a forum format) that suffered.
dxdm 9mo ago
I do not remember any specific examples, but when I still used SO, I've come across many cases personally where a question closely matching a problem I had was closed as a duplicate of another question that asked about a related, but different problem and had an answer that was not appropriate for my problem and the supposedly duplicate question. This significantly decreased the utility of clicking on SO links for me, to the point where I would avoid going to search results from SO first. The comments here are teeming with others voicing similar experiences. It is quite... something to read your response to this, which pretty much comes across as "nu-uh!", garnished with an appeal to "policy". I think your SO-specific bubble is a little different from most other people's. I've no doubt that overwhelmingly, the dupes are dupes, but on the other hand, the false positives you're discounting are overwhelming the user experience.
- zahlman 9mo ago
  > many cases personally where a question closely matching a problem I had was closed as a duplicate of another question that asked about a related, but different problem and had an answer that was not appropriate for my problem and the supposedly duplicate question. Yes. We consider that duplicate. Because the point is whether the question is duplicate, not whether the problem is duplicate. The point is not to solve the problem, so it isn't interesting whether the question is "appropriate to" the problem. The point is to give you the information you need.
  - dxdm 9mo ago
    I don't understand how you can read all this and conclude that people get the information they need. In fact, your latest response is so far out that I've started to seriously wonder if you're trying to troll. If you aren't: sorry, just trying to tell you how this comes across as absurdly disconnected. If you are: you're bad at trolling, or a master at satire. Either way, I'm outta here.
  - AngryData 9mo ago
    How does "give you the information you need" mesh with "The point is not to solve the problem"? They seem like mutually exclusive goals for 95% of cases.