alt Hacker News> That's not the case.
Yes, it is. I have been active on both the main and meta sites for many years. I have seen so many of these complaints and they overwhelmingly boil down to that. And I have gotten so unbelievably stressed out on so many occasions trying to explain to people why their trivial objections are missing the point of the site completely.
> I've seen many Qs marked as duplicate where the actual answer would be different in a non-trivial manner.
Please feel free to cite specific examples. I'll be happy to explain policy.
> When I look at who all moderated on those Qs, they are usually users who haven't contributed to that topic at SO.
That is generally irrelevant.
Replies
> Please feel free to cite specific examples. I'll be happy to explain policy.
How do I search for Qs closed as duplicates with a certain tag?
I do not remember any specific examples, but when I still used SO, I've come across many cases personally where a question closely matching a problem I had was closed as a duplicate of another question that asked about a related, but different problem and had an answer that was not appropriate for my problem and the supposedly duplicate question.
This significantly decreased the utility of clicking on SO links for me, to the point where I would avoid going to search results from SO first.
The comments here are teeming with others voicing similar experiences.
It is quite... something to read your response to this, which pretty much comes across as "nu-uh!", garnished with an appeal to "policy".
I think your SO-specific bubble is a little different from most other people's. I've no doubt that overwhelmingly, the dupes are dupes, but on the other hand, the false positives you're discounting are overwhelming the user experience.
Have you considered that the problem here is not insufficient explanation of policy?
There's this thing that some programmers do a lot, where it's the users who are wrong. Using it wrong, approaching it wrong, thinking about it wrong, wanting the wrong thing. Just not understanding enough the masterwork that the programmers created.
What this view misses is that the users are the point. If one user gets it wrong, sure, maybe it's the user. But broadly the point of software is to serve and adapt to users, and developers who forget that are starting an argument that they cannot win in the long term.
It's especially wild to see you talking like this on an article about how Stack Overflow is just about dead. It needed changes a decade ago, but everyone just hunkered down and defended the existing approach. The policies you are somehow still defending are a big part of what doomed the site.