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Comment by skeletal88

4 years ago

Honest questions getting downvoted, closed for being too broad, duplicates or just "Wrong" in the eyes of overzealous long time members

7 comments

skeletal88

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tester756  4 years ago

There's nothing wrong with duplicates

If they weren't doing it, then quality of SO would decrease for all of us.

It's in our interest to have strict mods on SO

  • burnished  4 years ago

    You haven't seen a question closed as a duplicate when it was clear that time or details had made the linked question not an actual duplicate?

    • JadeNB  4 years ago

      I think the idea is that it's better to err on the side of too-strict moderation than too-lax. People can always come back to re-try a question at another time, but, once the spirit of the community is lost, there's not much you can do about it.

      (Not to say I like the StackExchange community much. It's far too top-down directed for me. But I'm very much sympathetic to the spirit of strict moderation.)

      1 reply →

    • threatofrain  4 years ago

      I’ve never seen it develop into a serious problem, just as I’ve never seen rule driven Wikipedia have problems with rule obsession.

      There are all sorts of community websites around the world. Which have developed into a serious SO contendor? IMO many things are threatening SO’s relevance, but they don’t look anything like it, which suggests that what SO is doing wrong isn’t the small details.

      For example, I’d argue that Discord has become the next place for beginners to get answers, but chat rooms are very different from SO. For one thing, the help is better because someone else can spend their brain power to massage your problem. And another is that knowledge dies almost instantly.

      1 reply →

  • JadeNB  4 years ago

    Kind of like how the zero-tolerance of the HN community for joke-y / quick-take comments kills the fun sometimes—but also means that people (like me who came here from Reddit and discovered what wasn't welcome right quick) learn the culture, and get to remain part of the culture we signed up for rather than something that morphs over time to the lowest common denominator.