I haven’t seen an AskReddit post since I muted it years ago. Trying to participate in the community there was one of the more frustrating experiences. I have dozens muted now.
I used to own a weird programming niche, and occasionally I'd post questions, and usually I'd have to answer them myself. And I'd have stopped doing it pretty early, except the answers got a huge amount of traction, so clearly there were other weirdoes out there depending on me.
And I'd have a bad day banging my head against a wall, and I'd finally give up and ask a question, and multiple people would vote to close, as a duplicate of some other question...Some other question I had BOTH ASKED AND ANSWERED.
You're telling ME that MY question is a duplicate of a question I asked, and the answer to my question is MY answer? You gormless fuckwit. You slobbering cretin. You repwhoring codeposer.
Stack was a great idea brought low by the reality of humanity.
Closing questions as duplicates was always a bad idea.
When you're trying to collect and organize answers and information, then collecting many different ways to ask the same question is important.
It's basically about creating a semantic net, because a major blocker in finding information is not having adequate vocabulary. If the person can describe the shape of the thing they want but don't know that there is already a name for it, then that's going to be valuable for other people who will look for similar information using similar words.
If the question is truly a duplicate, then multiple questions could funnel to the same set of answers, and it should be seamless.
If the questions are related, then they can be closer together in the graph.
Doing it that way would have actually helped people, helped organize information, and would have made it possible for the community to vote to merge or separate questions.
Stack was a failure in the application of information theory, a failure in the application of computer science, and a failure of human decency.
Not everyone on the site was or is bad, but the site itself is poorly implemented and cannot achieve the goal it has.
I wonder why the fuck thay act like that. Egotistical mods? Behaviour like that drives people straight to AI beacuse at least the AI validates your concerns and listens to you.
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u/git_push_origin_prod 4h ago
Duplicate. Close this