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As someone who did predominately use stack overflow through Google search… I remember that half the time the top result was someone asking the question I had, o

by brigade 9mo ago

As someone who did predominately use stack overflow through Google search… I remember that half the time the top result was someone asking the question I had, only for it to be duped to a different question that didn’t answer the original. So they failed there.

darkwater 9mo ago
I question the "failed" here. You did land on their pages, after all. You most probably also clicked on an internal link and moved to another of their pages, and then bounced off.
- phoronixrly 9mo ago
  Man, what a perverted definition of success... They failed in being useful to the end users, but they damned sure made their engagement KPI look good, and also got a few ad impressions on the way.
  - darkwater 9mo ago
    Maybe my tone was not clear enough but I wasn't implying they did a great job for the end user, but they surely did for their revenue stream.
    - zahlman 9mo ago
      What you seem to overlook is that the people curating the site and setting up duplicate links don't see a penny of revenue. There is extreme misalignment between them and the actual stakeholders. Nowadays the site staff/owners are seen by the meta community basically as active saboteurs.
Permit 9mo ago
> I remember that half the time the top result was someone asking the question I had, only for it to be duped to a different question that didn’t answer the original. This is an entirely different problem than toxicity is it not? Like, if the moderators are bad at their job that seems uniquely different than the moderators were mean to me while doing their job.
- kstrauser 9mo ago
  Not OP but I think it’s the same problem. Mods got a pat on the back for “curating” (i.e. quickly closing) incoming questions, so they leaned far too far toward closing them ASAP for specious reasons because it rewarded themselves. Sure, there was a whole appeals process you could go through if you had infinite time and patience to beg the same cohort for permission, pretty please, to ask the question on the ask-the-question website, but the graph of people willing to do so over time looks a lot like their traffic graph.
  - fabian2k 9mo ago
    There is no reward for closing questions. The gamification is mostly via reputation, and only asking, answering (and very limited editing) grant reputation.
    - kstrauser 9mo ago
      I disagree. Look at the moderator election threads[0] and a good chunk of the would-be mods’ stories are demonstrating how good they are at deleting and flagging and downvoting content. And that stuff is important, but when it becomes a metric to optimize and brag about… [0]https://stackoverflow.com/election/16 https://stackoverflow.com/election/16
- falcor84 9mo ago
  It's not an entirely different problem because the main method through which moderators are mean is in closing new questions as dupes. A more positive q&a community might "steel-man" the question and try to find what's different about it, but SO's culture leaned heavily towards essentially telling people "go away, you don't have anything new and worthwhile for us".
  - Permit 9mo ago
    > It's not an entirely different problem because the main method through which moderators are mean is in closing new questions as dupes This discussion needs a grounded definition of "toxic" then. Elsewhere in this thread I see: > I disagree with this. You can tell someone that a question is not appropriate for a community without being a jerk. Or you can tell them that there needs to be more information in a question without being a jerk. I do not think being mean is a prerequisite for successful curation of information. So we're all speaking about different things it appears.
zahlman 9mo ago
Yes, sometimes you search and find someone else's attempt to ask something that looks very much like your question, but it's duped to a different question. There are a few common failure modes: * The originally asked question was very low quality; for example, it might have basically been a code dump and a "what's wrong?" where many things were wrong, one of which is what you were both asking about. Someone else may have decided that something else was the more proximate issue. * The OP was confused, and didn't really have your question. Or the question title was misleading or clickbaity. These should get deleted, but they tend to get forgotten about for a variety of reasons. * Sometimes two very different problems are described with all the same keywords, and it takes special effort to disentangle them. Even when the questions are properly separated, and even if every dupe is sent to the correct one of the two options, search engines can get confused. On the flip side, sometimes there are very different valid ways to phrase fundamentally the same question. My favourite example of the latter: "How can I sort a list, according to where its elements appear in another list?" (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/18016827 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/18016827) is a very different question from "Given parallel lists, how can I sort one while permuting (rearranging) the other in the same way?" (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9764298 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9764298). But the latter is fundamentally the same problem as in "Sorting list according to corresponding values from a parallel list" (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6618515 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6618515). It's very easy to imagine how someone with one of these problems could find the wrong Q&A with a search engine. And there were a lot of other duplicate questions I found that were directed to the wrong one, and if the site were as active as it was in 2020, I'm sure it would still be happening. And that's after the effort I (and others) put in to improve the prose and especially the titles, and add reference sections. The original titles for these questions were, respectively: "python sort list based on key sorted list"; "Is it possible to sort two lists(which reference each other) in the exact same way?"; "Sorting list based on values from another list?". No wonder people didn't get what they wanted.
actinium226 9mo ago
I have not had that experience, most of the time the duplicate question was answered, but to address the argument, it seems like it would be correct to mark a question as duplicate even if the original isn't answered. Why should there be two instances of the same question with no answer as opposed to one instance with no answer?

by brigade 9mo ago

darkwater 9mo ago

I question the "failed" here. You did land on their pages, after all. You most probably also clicked on an internal link and moved to another of their pages, and then bounced off.

phoronixrly 9mo ago
Man, what a perverted definition of success... They failed in being useful to the end users, but they damned sure made their engagement KPI look good, and also got a few ad impressions on the way.
- darkwater 9mo ago
  Maybe my tone was not clear enough but I wasn't implying they did a great job for the end user, but they surely did for their revenue stream.
  - zahlman 9mo ago
    What you seem to overlook is that the people curating the site and setting up duplicate links don't see a penny of revenue. There is extreme misalignment between them and the actual stakeholders. Nowadays the site staff/owners are seen by the meta community basically as active saboteurs.

Permit 9mo ago

> I remember that half the time the top result was someone asking the question I had, only for it to be duped to a different question that didn’t answer the original. This is an entirely different problem than toxicity is it not? Like, if the moderators are bad at their job that seems uniquely different than the moderators were mean to me while doing their job.

kstrauser 9mo ago
Not OP but I think it’s the same problem. Mods got a pat on the back for “curating” (i.e. quickly closing) incoming questions, so they leaned far too far toward closing them ASAP for specious reasons because it rewarded themselves. Sure, there was a whole appeals process you could go through if you had infinite time and patience to beg the same cohort for permission, pretty please, to ask the question on the ask-the-question website, but the graph of people willing to do so over time looks a lot like their traffic graph.
- fabian2k 9mo ago
  There is no reward for closing questions. The gamification is mostly via reputation, and only asking, answering (and very limited editing) grant reputation.
  - kstrauser 9mo ago
    I disagree. Look at the moderator election threads[0] and a good chunk of the would-be mods’ stories are demonstrating how good they are at deleting and flagging and downvoting content. And that stuff is important, but when it becomes a metric to optimize and brag about… [0]https://stackoverflow.com/election/16 https://stackoverflow.com/election/16
falcor84 9mo ago
It's not an entirely different problem because the main method through which moderators are mean is in closing new questions as dupes. A more positive q&a community might "steel-man" the question and try to find what's different about it, but SO's culture leaned heavily towards essentially telling people "go away, you don't have anything new and worthwhile for us".
- Permit 9mo ago
  > It's not an entirely different problem because the main method through which moderators are mean is in closing new questions as dupes This discussion needs a grounded definition of "toxic" then. Elsewhere in this thread I see: > I disagree with this. You can tell someone that a question is not appropriate for a community without being a jerk. Or you can tell them that there needs to be more information in a question without being a jerk. I do not think being mean is a prerequisite for successful curation of information. So we're all speaking about different things it appears.

zahlman 9mo ago

Yes, sometimes you search and find someone else's attempt to ask something that looks very much like your question, but it's duped to a different question. There are a few common failure modes: * The originally asked question was very low quality; for example, it might have basically been a code dump and a "what's wrong?" where many things were wrong, one of which is what you were both asking about. Someone else may have decided that something else was the more proximate issue. * The OP was confused, and didn't really have your question. Or the question title was misleading or clickbaity. These should get deleted, but they tend to get forgotten about for a variety of reasons. * Sometimes two very different problems are described with all the same keywords, and it takes special effort to disentangle them. Even when the questions are properly separated, and even if every dupe is sent to the correct one of the two options, search engines can get confused. On the flip side, sometimes there are very different valid ways to phrase fundamentally the same question. My favourite example of the latter: "How can I sort a list, according to where its elements appear in another list?" (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/18016827 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/18016827) is a very different question from "Given parallel lists, how can I sort one while permuting (rearranging) the other in the same way?" (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9764298 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9764298). But the latter is fundamentally the same problem as in "Sorting list according to corresponding values from a parallel list" (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6618515 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6618515). It's very easy to imagine how someone with one of these problems could find the wrong Q&A with a search engine. And there were a lot of other duplicate questions I found that were directed to the wrong one, and if the site were as active as it was in 2020, I'm sure it would still be happening. And that's after the effort I (and others) put in to improve the prose and especially the titles, and add reference sections. The original titles for these questions were, respectively: "python sort list based on key sorted list"; "Is it possible to sort two lists(which reference each other) in the exact same way?"; "Sorting list based on values from another list?". No wonder people didn't get what they wanted.

actinium226 9mo ago

I have not had that experience, most of the time the duplicate question was answered, but to address the argument, it seems like it would be correct to mark a question as duplicate even if the original isn't answered. Why should there be two instances of the same question with no answer as opposed to one instance with no answer?