Stack Overflow Isn’t Very Welcoming – It’s Time for That to Change

Re:Stack Overflow Isn’t Very Welcoming – It’s Time for That ... by cf498 on Thursday April 26, 2018 @05:36PM (#16936066)

>Most of the times I end up on Stack Overflow, I arrive via Google. I usually have to check for around 5 answers before I find one that hasn't been locked as "not constructive" or for some other arbitrary reason.

Thats kind of the point though isnt it? The idea is that you should find the right question and answer and not the x-th repost of them.

Anyone familiar with the side know why reposts arent simply deleted instead of locked? It seems locking them only worsens the problem they aimed to combat?

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Re:Stack Overflow Isn’t Very Welcoming – It’s Time for That ... by mark-r on Thursday April 26, 2018 @05:56PM (#16936230)

Sometimes it's helpful to have a question that's worded differently so that there's multiple ways of finding the answer. And sometimes a duplicate question gets an even better answer than the original before it gets locked.

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Re:Stack Overflow Isn’t Very Welcoming – It’s Time for That ... by jehlakj on Thursday April 26, 2018 @07:18PM (#16936883)

Also the timing helps a lot in some cases. Not every old and correct answers are updated constantly.

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Re:Stack Overflow Isn’t Very Welcoming – It’s Time for That ... by SimonPStevens on Thursday April 26, 2018 @05:57PM (#16936237)

I haven't been active for a long time now so this may have changed.

Back then the reason behind locking rather than deleting was because the duplicate may be asked in a different way, using different keywords. So keeping it viewable allowed people searching for an answer to effectively have multiple entry points into finding the answer because perhaps they were googling the wrong combination of keywords to get the original to show up, but the duplicate would match.

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