[brigade]

As someone who did predominately use stack overflow through Google search… I remember that half the time the top result was someone asking the question I had, only for it to be duped to a different question that didn’t answer the original. So they failed there.

[zahlman]

Yes, sometimes you search and find someone else's attempt to ask something that looks very much like your question, but it's duped to a different question. There are a few common failure modes:

* The originally asked question was very low quality; for example, it might have basically been a code dump and a "what's wrong?" where many things were wrong, one of which is what you were both asking about. Someone else may have decided that something else was the more proximate issue.

* The OP was confused, and didn't really have your question. Or the question title was misleading or clickbaity. These should get deleted, but they tend to get forgotten about for a variety of reasons.

* Sometimes two very different problems are described with all the same keywords, and it takes special effort to disentangle them. Even when the questions are properly separated, and even if every dupe is sent to the correct one of the two options, search engines can get confused. On the flip side, sometimes there are very different valid ways to phrase fundamentally the same question.

My favourite example of the latter: "How can I sort a list, according to where its elements appear in another list?" (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/18016827) is a very different question from "Given parallel lists, how can I sort one while permuting (rearranging) the other in the same way?" (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9764298). But the latter is fundamentally the same problem as in "Sorting list according to corresponding values from a parallel list" (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6618515). It's very easy to imagine how someone with one of these problems could find the wrong Q&A with a search engine. And there were a lot of other duplicate questions I found that were directed to the wrong one, and if the site were as active as it was in 2020, I'm sure it would still be happening.

And that's after the effort I (and others) put in to improve the prose and especially the titles, and add reference sections. The original titles for these questions were, respectively: "python sort list based on key sorted list"; "Is it possible to sort two lists(which reference each other) in the exact same way?"; "Sorting list based on values from another list?". No wonder people didn't get what they wanted.

[actinium226]

I have not had that experience, most of the time the duplicate question was answered, but to address the argument, it seems like it would be correct to mark a question as duplicate even if the original isn't answered. Why should there be two instances of the same question with no answer as opposed to one instance with no answer?

[Permit]

> I remember that half the time the top result was someone asking the question I had, only for it to be duped to a different question that didn’t answer the original.

This is an entirely different problem than toxicity is it not? Like, if the moderators are bad at their job that seems uniquely different than the moderators were mean to me while doing their job.

[kstrauser]

Not OP but I think it’s the same problem. Mods got a pat on the back for “curating” (i.e. quickly closing) incoming questions, so they leaned far too far toward closing them ASAP for specious reasons because it rewarded themselves.

Sure, there was a whole appeals process you could go through if you had infinite time and patience to beg the same cohort for permission, pretty please, to ask the question on the ask-the-question website, but the graph of people willing to do so over time looks a lot like their traffic graph.

[falcor84]

It's not an entirely different problem because the main method through which moderators are mean is in closing new questions as dupes. A more positive q&a community might "steel-man" the question and try to find what's different about it, but SO's culture leaned heavily towards essentially telling people "go away, you don't have anything new and worthwhile for us".

[darkwater]

I question the "failed" here. You did land on their pages, after all. You most probably also clicked on an internal link and moved to another of their pages, and then bounced off.

[phoronixrly]

Man, what a perverted definition of success... They failed in being useful to the end users, but they damned sure made their engagement KPI look good, and also got a few ad impressions on the way.