Comment by lurk2
5 months ago
> This is why all the moderation pushes toward deleting duplicates of questions, and having a single accepted answer.
Having duplicates of the question is precisely why people use LLMs instead of StackOverflow. The majority of all users lack the vocabulary to properly articulate their problems using the jargon of mathematicians and programmers. Prior to LLMs, my use case for StackOverflow was something like this:
30 minutes trying (and failing) to use the right search terms to articulate the problem (remember, there was no contextual understanding, so if you used a word with two meanings and one of those meanings was more popular, you’d have to omit it using the exclusion operator).
30 minutes reading through the threads I found (half of which will have been closed or answered by users who ignored some condition presented by the OP).
5 minutes on implementation.
2 minutes pounding my head on my desk because it shouldn’t have been that hard.
With an LLM, if the problem has been documented at any point in the last 20 years, I can probably solve it using my initial prompt even as a layman. When you’d actually find an answer on StackOverflow, it was often only because you finally found a different way of phrasing your search so that a relevant result came up. Half the time the OP would describe the exact problem you were having only for the thread to be closed by moderators as a duplicate of another question that lacked one of your conditions.
> Having duplicates of the question is precisely why people use LLMs instead of StackOverflow. The majority of all users lack the vocabulary to properly articulate their problems using the jargon of mathematicians and programmers.
Yes; so the idea is they fail to find the existing question, and ask it again, and get marked as a duplicate; and then everyone else with the same problem can search, possibly find the new duplicate version, and get automatically redirected to the main version with high quality answers.
Yes but that only works if the questions are identical. Often however they are merely similar, but closed as duplicates nonetheless.
No, that is completely wrong. It is exactly because the questions are not identical that the system works. That is what allows for multiple versions of a popular, important question to catch attention from search engines, and send everyone to the same, correct place.
Perhaps your objection is that, because the target question is not literally identical (for example, maybe a code sample has different variable names, or the setup has an irrelevant difference in the container type used for a collection, etc.) that the answers don't literally answer the new version of the question. That is completely missing the point. It's not a forum. The Q&A format is just the way that information is being presented. Fixing the issue in your, personal code is not, and never has been, the goal.
34 replies →
> Yes; so the idea is they fail to find the existing question, and ask it again, and get marked as a duplicate
Users would fail to find the existing question not because there was an abundance of poorly-worded questions, but because there was a dearth of questions asked using lay terminology that the user was likely to use.
Users were not searching for error codes but making naive preliminary searches like “XYZ doesn’t work” and then branching off from there. Having answers worded in a variety of ways allowed for greater odds that the user would find a question written the way he had worded his search.
Redirecting users to an older answer also just added pointless friction compared to allowing for the answer from the original question to be reposted on the duplicate question, in the exceedingly rare instances
I understand the motive behind wanting to exclude questions that are effectively just: “Do my work for me.” The issue is you have users actively telling you that the culling process didn’t really work the way it was supposed to, and you keep telling them that they are wrong, and that the site actually works well for its intended purpose—even though its intended purpose was to help users find what they were looking for, and they are telling you that they can’t.
Part of StackOverflow’s decline was inevitable and wouldn’t have been helped by any changes the site administrators could have made; a machine can simply answer questions a lot faster than a collection of human volunteers. But there is a reason people were so eager to leave. So now instead of conforming to what users repeatedly told the administrators that they wanted, StackOverflow can conform to being the repository of questions that the administrators wanted, just without any users or revenue besides selling the contributions made by others to the LLMs that users have demonstrated they actually want to use.
> to properly articulate their problems using the jargon of mathematicians and programmers
I once distilled a real-life problem into mathematical language exactly like how the Introduction to Algorithms book would pose them only to have the quesiton immediately closed with the explanation "don't post your CS homework".
(My employer at the time was very sensitive about their IP and being able to access the Internet from the work computer was already a miracle. I once sat through a whole day of InfoSec and diciplinary meetings for posting completely dummy bug repoduction code on Github.
"don't post your CS homework" is exactly the type of toxic comments that are not allowed on the site. Such a comment should have been flagged and would be deleted by moderators. Homework questions are welcome on SO.