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Having a question closed as a duplicate isn't something that should be taken personally. You're not expected to have an encyclopedic knowledge of the StackOver

Having a question closed as a duplicate isn't something that should be taken personally. You're not expected to have an encyclopedic knowledge of the StackOverflow answers. But some people do. And the goal of SO is not just to answer your question but to provide a useful resource for others. Having multiple questions that differ slightly and have the same answer provides a very high signal to noise ratio, so your question was closed. If your question wasn't actually a duplicate, or provided significant differentiation from the one that it (supposedly) duplicated then it does sound like your question should have stuck around. But otherwise, this is the right kind of housekeeping that keeps the site from turning into Yahoo Answers. It's really a win-win: you got your question answered and the corpus of the site did not grow.

mlangdon 13y ago
The questions were pretty radically different. The other question just happened to contain the answer to mine. So mine provides a valuable link for people asking the question I was asking while needing the answer to that other previously ungoogleable-by-the-terms-of-my-question question. Basically, if you weren't thinking of my question in terms of "recursion" you could not find the existing answer. The new answers also provided specific-to-my-question details. It's not about personal. To me it's about making the site more searchable, navigable and complete. Edit: Reply to child post: I also skew towards answering (about 4 to 1). But on the rare occasion when I can't find an answer and ask a question, I always get this treatment. The presumption is always against the asker. And this has made me less likely to answer questions (this being resentment).
- ethomson 13y ago
  Understandable. I've seen a lot of complaints about SO lately (and indeed they've changed some things in an effort to address some of these issues), but I haven't seen much of this first hand. However I tend to be on the answering side of questions rather than the asking side. I appreciate your further explanation as I try not to propagate these sorts of complaints.
- thedufer 13y ago
  I guess I don't see the problem. You got your answer from the "duplicate", right? And marking as duplicate gives google the search terms without creating duplicate answers. It sounds like this was exactly the outcome that's beneficial to everyone.

mlangdon 13y ago

The questions were pretty radically different. The other question just happened to contain the answer to mine. So mine provides a valuable link for people asking the question I was asking while needing the answer to that other previously ungoogleable-by-the-terms-of-my-question question. Basically, if you weren't thinking of my question in terms of "recursion" you could not find the existing answer. The new answers also provided specific-to-my-question details. It's not about personal. To me it's about making the site more searchable, navigable and complete. Edit: Reply to child post: I also skew towards answering (about 4 to 1). But on the rare occasion when I can't find an answer and ask a question, I always get this treatment. The presumption is always against the asker. And this has made me less likely to answer questions (this being resentment).

ethomson 13y ago
Understandable. I've seen a lot of complaints about SO lately (and indeed they've changed some things in an effort to address some of these issues), but I haven't seen much of this first hand. However I tend to be on the answering side of questions rather than the asking side. I appreciate your further explanation as I try not to propagate these sorts of complaints.
thedufer 13y ago
I guess I don't see the problem. You got your answer from the "duplicate", right? And marking as duplicate gives google the search terms without creating duplicate answers. It sounds like this was exactly the outcome that's beneficial to everyone.