If I was a mod here I'd lock this post with "duplicate" as a parody.

SO was good 10-15 years ago, but it has gotten bogged down in a combination of user elitism, mod incentives to do anything, and outdated answers remaining canonical.

• User elitism: You see this anywhere else too. Older users hold power on the site, and this tends to result in walling out those with actual refreshing ideas.

• Mod incentives: The system rewards mod actions, even if those actions aren't the correct one. For example, closing a question as duplicate, even if it's not, rewards the closer.

• Due to the above, the "correct" answer to a question never gets updated, and it doesn't take later versions into account. As such the site becomes a collection of outdated answers to questions that may or may not still be relevant.

Source: Formerly prolific user of multiple stackexchange sites

The folks who say “just google it” are often unaware of how their own experience allows them to determine good instructions from bad.

For instance, if I told you to flummox the bumdarten by fluxing the foogartner, how would you begin learning what any of those words mean? How will you know if the bumdarten docs you’ve found are even the current version?

But at some point we have all encountered someone who simply asks for help instead of figuring out how to do it. And those people are usually in management.

Used to spend a lot of time reading meta.stackoverflow (looked an awful lot like work at a quick glance). The sentiment from the question answerer side is something like: "I've answered this exact question 100s of times, why won't anyone search". Then this expands into enough irritation that you get a closing frenzy and similar sounding questions get caught in the cross hairs. And then everyone's mad. (plus a sprinkle of people who are just assholes on top of that)

I have good experience with all the stack/exchange etc. sites. I once tried to ask a question there, and that was horrible, but for finding solutions it's good. Of course one actually has to click on links provided, or scroll down to further answers, or even read comments.

It's a horrible meritocracy for people participating, but for people looking for answers it's definitely a net positive.

At some point people forget this didn't feel easy or intuitive to them either. Then "simple" questions and complaints come off as more annoying or funny.

(For context they are replying to this link https://sherlockproject.xyz/installation)

Never understood the issue with "closed as duplicate", it always links to the original question so you get your answer there. And for most things even the duplicate has a solid accepted answer too. Maybe I visit a different part of the site through my questions?

Then you’re going to hate “just LLM it”.

As far as I understand stackoverflow wants to be a wiki based on discussions. The consequences of this is whenever something feels duplicate it gets culled.

Stackoverflow can't seem to distinguish new content from existing

Toxic-culture won.

Period.

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