The original post uses “roll-up” instead of “catch-all” for some reason. I meant to crosspost this hours ago but something happened, sorry.
There is a long-festering problem in some tags where some questions are closed by dupehammers, using a single roll-up question as the duplicate target. A “roll-up” question is defined here as a question trying to cover multiple minor topics within one question and a set of answers. So this Java question about null pointer exceptions does not qualify, as it is about a single topic.
A prime example would be this regex roll-up which has a large number of duplicates. This was by design.
Questions that are clear duplicates, but you can’t find one quickly.
To be fair, PHP and other tags have such roll-ups (example), and I have participated in hammering them as such. And there are a lot of questions that are low quality, where the temptation is to simply close them as the duplicates of the roll-up. I mean, it answers the question, doesn’t it?
The problem is that this has started to promote two undesirable community actions:
Lazy closure
Dupehammers are a “one and done” action. Moreover, there is a belief is that these questions answer all the “core” elements and are therefore “useful” in low quality situations. The question for regex theoretically covers all symbols used within, so why isn’t that useful? But this type of closure assumes that the roll-up covers all cases. The danger of dupehammers has always been that the target question doesn’t really cover a specific use case. Lazy closure doesn’t even bother to find that out first. Thus it becomes the action of choice for dupehammer users. It’s problematic, but the community largely self-regulates this so it’s not been a major issue. A low quality question can be closed for many other reasons beyond duplicate.
Tag gatekeeping
This action is the more problematic one. What we’ve been seeing for some time are “brigades” (for lack of any better term) of users who are committed to ensuring that only questions they see fit in a tag are open. Thus we get a number of these:
What this has turned into is not laziness, but deliberate actions, where we see the same users doing this over and over. Or, to quote a comment under the question I got the screenshot from:
I invite readers to examine the earlier question and ask themselves if any question could possibly be a duplicate of that question. If the answer is “no”, please vote to reopen (and leave a comment giving your reasons for doing so). Closing this question, in this way, is sending a clear message to Peter, the OP (the polite version): “get lost”. This catch-all closing of questions having a “regex” tag must stop.
I don’t know that it sends a “get lost” message, as much as it sends another message moderators have been fighting against for years: RTFM. What these roll-ups have become, in essence, is another “fine” manual for users to read. Duplicate closure like this is basically throwing a volume of information at users and telling them “Figure out what, in this giant pile of information, answers your question.” That’s not useful.
It also effectively acts as a veto for anything any dupehammer user sees fit to close it as. Roll-up questions worked well as a philosophy for a long time, but (as the old saying goes), this is why we can’t have nice things.
The rule
The rule would be as follows:
Roll-up questions are useful in general, but may not provide enough guidance to users with specific questions, and serve as poor signposts to users looking for specific answers. Please use only specific questions for duplicate closure.
FAQ
- Moderators would enforce this new rule. No system changes would be made.
- Moderators would find out about violations via flags. Moderators already get an autoflag for closure disputes, and users could flag instances of this rule being violated.
- Enforcement would follow standard enforcement: A warning on the first offense and suspension for subsequent violations.
- Any other duplicate closure would still be allowed. If someone feels strongly enough that it’s a duplicate, they should go find that specific question. Moderators will still not solve duplicate disputes, but the list of roll-up questions isn’t long, and it’s a fairly objective standard to enforce.
When I first started learning to program I was constantly told “use StackOverflow” and “the people there have answers to all your questions”. So I did, I asked my question, I got 2 responses: the first was someone earnestly answering question, and the second was someone flaming me for asking such a simple question. Literally 1 minute later the thread was locked, and I was banned. I was so disheartened and embarrassed that I just stopped learning to program.
Unfortunately, this is how it has always been, at least for me over the last thirty+ years of programming. It has been getting better, but there are still a bunch of old school assholes who seem to think that being shamed and learning everything through personal trial and error is the best way to learn because that is how they learned.
I have no horse in this race, but most beginner questions are covered on StackOverflow, the language docs, etc. Closing a question as a dupe (accurately) leads the asker to the answer, and centralizes the information to that one thread, making it more helpful for those who learn to search before asking.
Beginners, in general, can’t necessarily read a long list of things and figure out which one of the things applies to their question. So simply closing as a dupe without any guidance is not good.
And even simply closing and marking as a dupe is fine. But that’s not what the person I’m responding to and I are talking about. Having someone come in and shame a beginner and then ban their account is not mentioned in your response, but is the shitty behavior that needs to change.
I think they were talking about dupes of non-catch-all questions
The IT scene has changed a lot since their time unfortunately. Many of us have to pick up new stuff quickly for our jobs in a very low time often. While going through proper materials is a way, one may or may not have time for full “trial and error” method.
I can relate to this. I joined a modding Discord and got treated similarly by the regulars there because I made the mistake of admitting in chat that I was not a programmer. I distinctly remember using the phrase “Could you explain the concept?” and some pretentious illiterate fuck thought for some reason that that meant “Can you write the code for me?” and kept telling me that I would never learn that way.
Something similar happened to me. I started to program, wanted to answer an question. Explained the issue a bit and posted an link to it with more Info. Got downvoted and removed because you have to make every link gratuitous with explanation about the content. I know it’s a best practice but I am a bit salty, because I see a lot of posts which do not follow this rule. So part of the issue is my own stuborness. Anyway, now I can’t answer questions anymore and my only choice to gain poins is asking questions. Buuuut I am hestitating because of storys like yours.