The overall ethos of rigidity at stackoverflow has gotten out of control.
On the one hand if I want to make a one character edit because some code snippet is broken in a non obvious way that will frustrate the next hundred people, I am told to add six. If I add six, say a comment on the edited code, I am very very likely to be rolled back. Good luck making diligence work for you in that scenario.
On the other hand, if I ask a question about a specific, mildly arcane manipulation of a data structure in python and I ask it in ordinary language that will probably make for good googling... But the answer, not the question already exists, I get voted to close. I.e., why didn't I already know the answer so I would know the correct terms to google when I googled my question five ways before asking?
Overall, it has become a more and more frustrating experience to participate in over last few years. Still a valuable thing to have exist, but I do not relish the moment when it occurs to me that an SO question might be the most expedient solution.
Having a question closed as a duplicate isn't something that should be taken personally.
You're not expected to have an encyclopedic knowledge of the StackOverflow answers. But some people do. And the goal of SO is not just to answer your question but to provide a useful resource for others. Having multiple questions that differ slightly and have the same answer provides a very high signal to noise ratio, so your question was closed.
If your question wasn't actually a duplicate, or provided significant differentiation from the one that it (supposedly) duplicated then it does sound like your question should have stuck around.
But otherwise, this is the right kind of housekeeping that keeps the site from turning into Yahoo Answers. It's really a win-win: you got your question answered and the corpus of the site did not grow.
The questions were pretty radically different. The other question just happened to contain the answer to mine. So mine provides a valuable link for people asking the question I was asking while needing the answer to that other previously ungoogleable-by-the-terms-of-my-question question.
Basically, if you weren't thinking of my question in terms of "recursion" you could not find the existing answer.
The new answers also provided specific-to-my-question details.
It's not about personal. To me it's about making the site more searchable, navigable and complete.
Edit:
Reply to child post:
I also skew towards answering (about 4 to 1). But on the rare occasion when I can't find an answer and ask a question, I always get this treatment. The presumption is always against the asker. And this has made me less likely to answer questions (this being resentment).
Understandable. I've seen a lot of complaints about SO lately (and indeed they've changed some things in an effort to address some of these issues), but I haven't seen much of this first hand.
However I tend to be on the answering side of questions rather than the asking side. I appreciate your further explanation as I try not to propagate these sorts of complaints.
I guess I don't see the problem. You got your answer from the "duplicate", right? And marking as duplicate gives google the search terms without creating duplicate answers. It sounds like this was exactly the outcome that's beneficial to everyone.
I'm glad I am not alone in this experience. I think because the place has become so hostile apart from the existing set of questions, I just stop participating. I end up doing what I always do on Quora, read the answer, and get the hell out. whereas 4 years ago, I looked forward to coming back because it was a great site back then.
On the one hand if I want to make a one character edit because some code snippet is broken in a non obvious way that will frustrate the next hundred people, I am told to add six. If I add six, say a comment on the edited code, I am very very likely to be rolled back. Good luck making diligence work for you in that scenario.
On the other hand, if I ask a question about a specific, mildly arcane manipulation of a data structure in python and I ask it in ordinary language that will probably make for good googling... But the answer, not the question already exists, I get voted to close. I.e., why didn't I already know the answer so I would know the correct terms to google when I googled my question five ways before asking?
Overall, it has become a more and more frustrating experience to participate in over last few years. Still a valuable thing to have exist, but I do not relish the moment when it occurs to me that an SO question might be the most expedient solution.