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Comment by rerdavies | Hacker News Reader

It was trivially easy to close dup a question that looked like it was a dup from the title, but much harder to actually read the contents of the questions, and realize that they were not. And you got points even if you were completely wrong. SO would have been much better if there were no close dups at all.

And even if the questions were actually duplicates, far too often the answers would be so out of date that it would be better if the question (and the answers) were allowed to start again from scratch.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.

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> And you got points even if you were completely wrong.

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)

You do not get any points for closing a question.

That's not quite right. Deletionists campaigned to be elected as moderators based on the number of questions they closed. For example: https://stackoverflow.com/election/14

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.

When they added review queues there were badges tied to closing questions. The queues made a lot of existing problems a lot more public and prominent.

Badges had no impact on rep or any moderation or curation abilities on the site. Review queues could be completed with "leave open" or "reopen" rather than closing or leaving closed if one was after getting a badge.

A gold tag badge lets you do some things like closing a question with a single vote.

Most of the badges was for reviewing, a "this question looks fine to me" gave the same progress as "close the question".

> "SO would have been much better if there were no close dups at all."

Do you spend much time on Quora? Or AskReddit? Do you like that they are endlessly 'the same' questions over and over and over?

How would you even notice without being chronically online? I visit these places and see users complaining about questions repeating, but never notice myself, since I don't read that kinda stuff every day.

Because the people providing the value here, those answering, saw them day after day. That the freeloaders didn't holds no weight.

If you aren't paid and you are not having fun, why "provide value"?

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