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Comment by cballard | Hacker News Reader

I asked a question on a Stack Exchange site (not SO) that was immediately reported as a duplicate. It wasn't, the duplicate wasn't even close in multiple ways, and someone else jumped in to defend the question - he was then upvoted by several people. Despite this, there is a permanent prompt to either accept that the question is a duplicate, or to edit my question and explain why it isn't.

This is nonsensical, because the reason that it isn't a duplicate is inherent in the question itself. I'm not sure how I would edit it without writing a non-sequitur. Even though I've actually accepted a correct answer, I cannot get rid of the prompt.

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Yeah - my experience with the Stack Overflow moderation community has been uniformly negative too, they basically get in the way of the users.

Arbitrarily closing/rewriting questions, removing useful information etc. The site can be useful - but only in spite of the community tasked with running it (not because of them) and it makes it frustrating to use.

I work for Stack Overflow: it might help to know that the prompt isn't permanent; it will go away in between 4-14 days (as the votes or flags that triggered it age away).

We added that prompt because a huge number of people were asking questions that were either duplicates or were so poorly presented that the nugget of information that made them unique was obscured; either way, the asker wasn't getting an answer. It's been live for just under a year now, and the response has been incredible: more duplicate questions are confirmed by the askers themselves than are closed by voters; meanwhile, the number of people editing their questions has also gone up.

Sorry you had a bad experience with it, but this is part of the work we've been doing to reduce the amount of conflict and frustration on the part of both askers and answerers.

Did you try deleting it and asking it again, rewritten in a way that makes it totally clear why it isn't a duplicate?

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