Comment by arp242 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by arp242 | Hacker News Reader

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> There's too much emphasis on closing questions that are duplicates (when in fact they are not, and technology changes so a duplicate question asked 2 years later is going to get different responses)

Note you can still post answers to older questions; this is actually encouraged!

Closing of duplicates is the least of Stack Overflow's problems IMHO; it's done for a very real reason: if I search "how to do foo in bar?" then it's really great to have one question with all answers, instead of having to trawl through several questions. Also, as someone who spent quite a lot of time writing in-depth answers over the years, I'd rather not repeat that every month.

I have a lot of criticism of Stack Overflow, and I mostly stopped answering because I got fed up as well, but this isn't a problem IMO.

> Also, often enough the accepted answer for a question is not the best answer and instead the best answer can be found by looking at other answers or the comments (which I agree with the author should not be seen as ephemeral but are instead critical)

Generally those comments should be integrated in the answer; usually if I come upon an answer with helpful comments I will edit the answer to include that information.

I do wish the entire "accepted answer" feature would be removed though, or at the very least stop pinning them to the top.

> Note you can still post answers to older questions; this is actually encouraged!

Although, this can lead to its own weird problems.

I've been learning Objective C, and I've come across a lot of Stack Overflow questions which ask how to do a thing in Objective C, but where all the top answers are in Swift. Sometimes an older Objective C answer is just buried; sometimes it isn't there at all.

I realize that Swift is the newer language, but it's not the one I'm using, and the question was about Objective C.

Objective-C/Swift is a bit of a special case; but asking "how to do X in Objective C" is probably fine, even if there is already a Swift question. And a lot of questions tend to be about libraries/frameworks anyway, and the Swift answer should be usable in Objective C too.

> Objective-C/Swift is a bit of a special case; but asking "how to do X in Objective C" is probably fine, even if there is already a Swift question.

To be clear, it's the other way around—someone asked a question about Objective C, and people answered how to do it in Swift.

From the perspective of "it's good to post updated answers to older questions" this makes sense, because there's a decent chance the asker would have requested Swift if the question was asked today. But as it stands, the question lists Objective C.

Which is to say, a lot of questions are "products of their time", and posting modern answers to older questions sometimes requires assumptions about what the asker would have wanted. I'm not sure what the best solution is.

> someone asked a question about Objective C, and people answered how to do it in Swift.

Well, then this is a wrong answer haha.

> Which is to say, a lot of questions are "products of their time", and posting modern answers to older questions sometimes requires assumptions about what the asker would have wanted. I'm not sure what the best solution is.

I think it probably depends on the exact question and details; there isn't really a good one-size-fits-all solution.

A question is considered a duplicate only when it's an exact duplicate. Sometimes question get closed as duplicates erroneously as they're not exact duplicates, just very similar, and this can be an issue, but I don't think that's the biggest problem on Stack Overflow, and a lot of questions really are exact duplicates.

A lot of these issues are kind of scaling issues: with about 7,000 questions every day, many of whom are not exactly stellar, it's pretty hard to deal with them all. For year I've argued that improvements in messaging and such would make a big improvement, and Stack Overflow is finally doing some work on that now. For example the comment was changed from "Possible duplicate of [other question]" to "Does this answer your question: [other question]". The latter is much more friendly and helpful. People don't mark questions as dupes to be mean, but just as the easiest way to guide you to an answer (hopefully...)

I bet this is a result of the dichotomy of purpose that this comment by notriddle is describing[1]:

> They want it to form a general resource, with Stack Overflow being less of a bulletin board and more of a reference guide. The problem is that their UI doesn't telegraph this very well (I blame the way they leave the original asker's name and avatar visible on the question), and neither do their marketing materials. They're kinda trying to have it both ways, baiting people with the chance to get their own question getting answered and then switching to editing their question into something more generally useful than something just for them.

Easy to look at an old question and think "There's no point posting another answer here, the asker is long gone." If we thought about it more like a wiki page and less like Yahoo Answers that wouldn't be the case.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26163113

Yeah, the UI/communication could improve here. Stack Overflow suffers from a lot of mismatched expectations.

Some of my most successful answers have been to old questions by the way: I try to solve a problem, the Stack Overflow question doesn't contain a solution I like, I figure it out, and I post it as an answer.

Shouldn’t a proper sorting (based on activity, karma, number of answers) take care of this (= duplicate questions)?

Not necessarily; and Stack Overflow doesn't control Google's sorting. It would also mean people would have to keep answering the same questions over and over again, which would be a waste of everyone's time.

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