Why did it matter if the question you visited was closed as a duplicate? Still you would find your answer by following it. People wrongly think a duplicate was something wrong. They probably could've made it clearer.
"How do I do X in Python?"
"This has already been answered in <other question>. Closing as duplicate."
And then you look up that other question and it's "How do I do X in PHP?"
Ask how to prevent XSS, and someone will flag it as a duplicate of a question asking how to prevent SQL Injection. Ask how to encode something in Base64, someone will flag it as a duplicate of a question about how to encrypt something with AES.
And the worst part, is that these moron moderators pat themselves on the back for keeping SO clean.
And even if the questions were actually duplicates, far too often the answers would be so out of date that it would be better if the question (and the answers) were allowed to start again from scratch.
And I agree: the "opinion" close was toxic as well.
A tragic gamification failure, that contributed significantly to my drift away from SO.
One of the oft repeated ideas is that you got points for closing questions.
You don't. The only ways to get rep on stack overflow is described at https://stackoverflow.com/help/whats-reputation
You gain reputation when:
question is voted up: +10
answer is voted up: +10
article is voted up: +10
answer is marked “accepted”: +15 (+2 to acceptor)
suggested edit is accepted: +2 (up to +1000 total per user)
bounty awarded to your answer: + full bounty amount
one of your answers is awarded a bounty automatically: + half of the bounty amount (see more details about how bounties work)
site association bonus: +100 on each site (awarded a maximum of one time per site)
They did not directly increase the integer counter of their reputation score. They did use it to explain why they should be granted increased human reputation as a moderator.
Do you spend much time on Quora? Or AskReddit? Do you like that they are endlessly 'the same' questions over and over and over?
That's a bit clearer. Bit long to engrave on a tombstone though, but SO will remain unburied because after all, most coffins are pretty similar.
No. A duplicate is fine.
What was wrong was when "duplicate" questions were closed in favor of other more-upvoted questions with less-correct answers, or questions that were marked duplicate which were in fact not duplicate.
It isn't self-appointed, everyone is a 'moderator'. And 'everyone' could vote to re-open closed questions.
That is, typically the largest consolidated voting group is going to be your moderators. 5 or 6 people with one particular problem don't represent enough voting pressure to re-open any topic.
1. Were actually duplicates of existing questions
2. That had a correct, up to date answer
was definitely less than 1%
It got grossly misapplied because it became "look at any answer, if one of the answers it the same, then they are duplicate". Note how likeness became overlap and likelyhood became certainty. Two questions where restart might solve the problem became duplicates under that absurd policy. Your example on the other hand I didn't find. I didn't find anyone claiming that two questions are duplicate of one another in different programming languages unless the language is not relevant.
Did... Did you just mentally mark my comment as a duplicate question and copy/paste an unrelated answer?
No, Bratmon does exactly the same assertion
I am honestly at a loss here as to how you are not seeing this is a very different claim, and so am now also on the theory that this is some kind of performance art to reenact the frustration of someone claiming a question that is different is in fact some kind of duplicate content.
Again, this claim was made by a different user in a different branch of discussion off of this post, but it wasn't made by that user or even within this thread: Bratmon makes absolutely no claim about people crossing programming languages for marking duplicates. (I am done, though: feel free to now have the last word.)
I didn't read that comment. I don't care about that comment at all. I am someone that complains about sloppy duplicate question and it's only in fringe cases that I gave a example of. Branton is saying that almost all duplication is wrong, that's a lie, because if he had any concern by the truth he would not have made that assertion