> The first question is a request for ideas. That's offtopic for SO.
> The second question was a good question, but since it ended up being a bug in your setup, and not actually part of the language, it wasn't as useful of a general question. This one I'd argue could be trimmed down further to a SCCEE for the bug and rephrased, but it doesn't matter now since the bug is auto-patched.
> The third question has a great question set-up (formatted and straight to the point with SCCEEs) but the answer is the same as the linked duplicate so it should be closed.
> The fourth question is another straight up duplicate asking for the meaning of certain Regex characters.
Yup, classic SO bashing. "They closed my question for no reason!!", "I asked a well formed question and they down voted me!!". And people either refuse to give examples (because they know they're lying), or when responding it's quite obvious why they got the reaction they got.
Mind you, I believe SO could be more friendly. But if you've tried moderating and being active there, you quickly understand the bluntness. With hundreds of useless questions being posted an hour, you quickly get jaded. Like, I genuinely want to help people there, but when you spend literally no effort asking your question you're not getting much in return.
There are a lot of people on Stack Overflow who struggle to tell if an existing answer is an answer to their question or not. They might copy something verbatim from an answer and have it not work because their shell is configured differently, there's a separate bug in their code, or even because they accidentally copied a PHP code snippet into a Javascript file, and whether through laziness or genuine confusion, they simply post the errors back to SO saying the answer doesn't work for them.
People these days are taught to always seek help as soon as they encounter difficulties, and I think they feel like as long as they're asking for help, then they're doing the right thing and deserve to have their problem solved. But when they need somebody to work through multiple issues with them, in multiple layers of their setup, and there's quite a lot they don't understand that's unrelated the concrete question they posed, then that crosses the line of relevancy to the question asked, as well as the line of what most SO contributors are willing to do. Most people who answer a Stack Overflow question do it because they're happy to take a few minutes out of their day to share their knowledge, not because they want to a second job as an unpaid private tutor. If someone needs that level of support, then they should ask another developer on their team, ask a teacher at their school, hire a tutor, etc.
Obviously there are a lot of circumstances where it's good to give back and give someone a little bit of extra help, but if you need someone to help you debug your Dockerfile, that discussion doesn't belong on a question about Python asyncio, and it doesn't justify posting the same question again and again because copy-pasting the original answers didn't solve your problem.
A lot of the bashing is accurate though. I'd seen tons of questions closed as duplicates, then gone to the thing it's supposed to be a duplicate of, and... its not. Glaringly, blatantly ... not a duplicate. Its as if the person that closed it as a duplicate didn't even read the question well enough to understand it. And, because of that, there's no answer to the new question.
Moderators like to close questions and link to questions/answers posted by them. (Possibly hoping for upvotes)
I guess this could count as petty corruption.
Here's my non-low-effort question which was closed for being a duplicate. I found help on another forum and resolved never to waste my time posting a question on SO again. The cost/benefit ratio is off the charts.
"Closed as duplicate" has nothing to do with effort or question quality. The only thing that matters is whether the linked questions/answers contain the solution.
I would say based on the linked conversation that they linked answers do answer your question. Or at least, from an outsider perspective, they should have allowed you to reach a workable solution (though maybe without directly answering you actual question).
I've had similar questions where I'm told it's a duplicate or that the error message says exactly what the problem is, but I'm just so uncomfortable in the language that I can't recognize it. It feels really bad when people roll their eyes and link you (or tell you to go back to the documentation, which is the ultimate "fuck you" from someone you've asked for help) to something that you also don't quite understand. If I "got" it I wouldn't be here asking this question.
I feel for people that spend any amount of time trying to moderate that place. I try going through triage and its just an endless sea of low effort shit.
I get that technically this is correct (the best kind of correct).
But the UX of the site is basically "post a question, get modded to shit" now.
I don't think the original author is complaining about the functionality, or even the community (though debatable). I think they're complaining about the UX. And that's not something we can argue with - they think they're posting valid questions, and their experience is that their questions are always rejected. This is true, and it remains true even if technically their questions should be rejected for valid reasons.
> But the UX of the site is basically "post a question, get modded to shit" now.
I'm sympathetic - but have you ever noticed, when people complain about their questions being closed unfairly, how rarely they provide links to the questions?
If I'd posted 5 great questions, they'd all been unfairly closed, and I wanted to convince other people that was the case, I'd be linking to them - why wouldn't I present the primary evidence?
The main post[0] you go on about in there is a badly formatted question: It's not self-contained, and relies entirely on external links. It doesn't surprise me it got close votes.
SO has made it clear that they don't want "my kind" participating, so ... I won’t go, where I’m not wanted. Life’s too short.
That question was a bit of a "trial balloon." I'd pretty much written SO off.
* pop *
Problem solved.
Just S’s and G’s, might want to take a gander at some of the other (over 100) questions I’ve asked. They are not all perfect, so there’s plenty of ammo.
> It's not self-contained, and relies entirely on external links.
The question does not rely on external links. The links just provide optional additional context (about how to use a custom URL scheme and what DRY is). The question has the ios, xcode and swift tags, so even without the links, it is pretty clear what the asker is looking for.
I don't see what's not to like about the interaction on that URL scheme question (apart from the close vote), it looks like you got a perfectly good answer in 10 minutes.
Am I just missing the condescension here? Maybe something that's been removed or I'm not looking in the right place?
SO definitely has issues but I just don't see it on this one.
It's a matter of tone, and how the question was answered.
I know it could be different. It has been different.
NBD. I won't be going to that drywell for water, anymore, so it's fine.
I was dealing with something, yesterday, that is exactly the type of thing that I would have gone to SO for, in the old days (customizing the Contacts Editor), but I don't really feel like dealing with the agita, for what would really be nothing more than a little vanity chrome on my app. I'll probably figure it out, if I really want to. I always do; it just takes time. What SO has done (in the past), was give me actionable and correct answers, very quickly.
IMHO question closure should be a vote left to the community and not one angry moderator. Where people browsing questions can vote on whether it is a complete duplicate or still provides value to the reader.
That's a GREAT discussion to be had... SO purpose is to be a kind of encyclopedia, so it makes sense to try to categorize duplicates (eventually fading them into obscurity). But is that the best experience for the user? Is it supposed to serve only readers, or those who are actually asking questions?
That’s not really fair. The UX of the site is actually very persistent in reminding you how to post a good question and listing suggested duplicates. When posting questions with low reputation you can’t bypass these reminders without clicking accept several times.
As someone who mostly just runs into SO through searches and rarely asks: I want to see these duplicates thrive, I want to see the ideas. It's so common that the first SO thread is useless but that a near duplicate does actually provide me with the answer I need. Unfortunately, near half the questions I land on which I feel might actually help me are shut down, which is not just a complete waste of an opportunity but also a waste of my time.
idk, I've often answered old questions with newer/better answers that get far more upvotes than the one OP chose back in the day as new people land on the question.
Trying to canonicalize dupe questions into one makes a lot of sense. Otherwise, good answers would be scattered across duplicate questions which is quite a large trade-off as well.
Yes, the questions are now gone, but the person who replied went through the trouble of linking the questions in the first place so we didn't have to take their word for it.
You can even read the questions from the URLs: "/meaning-of-dollar-sign-after-digit-and-dash-in-a-regex" C'mon.
This is a common trope with people complaining about SO, so it's not surprising they had terrible questions. Nobody likes to admit when their questions are bad.
https://old.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/116vvpp/saying_good...
> The first question is a request for ideas. That's offtopic for SO.
> The second question was a good question, but since it ended up being a bug in your setup, and not actually part of the language, it wasn't as useful of a general question. This one I'd argue could be trimmed down further to a SCCEE for the bug and rephrased, but it doesn't matter now since the bug is auto-patched.
> The third question has a great question set-up (formatted and straight to the point with SCCEEs) but the answer is the same as the linked duplicate so it should be closed.
> The fourth question is another straight up duplicate asking for the meaning of certain Regex characters.