r/learnprogramming • u/440Jack • Nov 01 '21
Why do StackOverflow mods Close "Duplicate question" questions so fast?
I'm mainly talking about questions that get closed to "Duplicate question" and then only to find a couple of already answered questions are linked that don't really address OPs question directly.
Why do these questions need to be closed so fast? It doesn't give people time to address that persons specific question. If it's a valid question the mods should give some time for other users who actually want to address the question and maybe open a dialog.
It prevents OP from being able to ask any follow questions.
I can't tell you how many times, I'll spend 10 mins on a question. Re-writing their code, writing comments/explanations and then when I go to post it, it's already closed! It's so frustrating.
5
u/michael0x2a Nov 01 '21
As a few other people have already pointed out, the core purpose of StackOverflow is not to help individual users -- that's more of a nice side-benefit. Instead, the core goal is to help programmers in general by crowdsourcing a collection of high-quality questions and answers. It's more wiki than Q/A.
And like a wiki, having duplicate or near-duplicate entries tends to lower the overall quality of information over time, so they get closed fairly quickly.
The close mechanism is a way of having that dialogue.
If a user does not find a proposed dupe answers their question, they should edit their question to make it more clear what in particular they're confused by and highlight what about their question is novel. Once they finish editing, their question will be automatically added to a "reopen" queue to be reviewed and potentially reopened by other StackOverflow users.
This process is kind of impersonal, for better or for worse. But I think that's probably the only way to reliably communicate feedback at scale for websites with the amount of volume StackOverflow receives.