But why are we talking about shoulds that will never get done when a really good answer is already here? You've got users actively providing good content and your response is to reprimand them and tell them that content should be over here instead? You know, we have these things called links on the world wide web. The internet isn't running out of them.

Sometimes it feels like the mods are building a really tidy card catalog at the expense of the books in the collection.

Reasons:

  - Gets rid of the "This was closed because of trigger-happy
    moderators failing to distinguish between 'similar' and
    'identical'" problem by making that situation impossible.

  - Improves answer discovery for users: If Google gets you
    to almost, but not quite, the right question, 
    cross-referencing gets you the rest of the way.

  - Improves answer discovery for users: Maybe the best answer
    today isn't the same as the best answer 5 years ago.

  - Improves gamification: Rewards are the lifeblood of
    a site like Stack Overflow.  A way of dealing with
    duplicate questions that rewards users for 
    cross-referencing them is infinitely more in line with
    SE's basic idea than one that punishes them with
    public shaming. 

  - Reduces opportunity for petty bureaucrats to take root.

  - Represents a more thoughtful, measured way of thinking
    about software engineering.  Many questions really can
    have more than one correct answer, or the correct answer
    can depend on subtle details.  Which answer gets the
    green check mark may have as much to do with the situation
    of the asker than the quality of the answer.

(Yes, I think SO looks like a bug tracker used as a discussion forum. They're certainly very close, including hostile project owners, WONTFIX's, etc.)

An alternative to shaming is that you could just accept this great new content that a volunteer is giving you.

Whenever a question gets a new post it gets bumped up to the top of the activity again - the same amount of possible attention as when an hour old question gets a new answer too.

What it really comes down to, though, is that when somebody asks a new question, I want to answer their new question, with all of its subtleties, in response to its particular phrasing, in its context.

Edit: In fact, I should admit that I usually only put the effort into answering old questions when it's something that has a lot of views. It's an indication that the question is linked somewhere prominent or is ranking well for some search terms. Those questions are worth putting the time in for. Most aren't.

Closing with a link to the original is cross-referencing in a way that does just the opposite: It decreases the vitality of the community by taking away opportunities for newcomers to take part in the gamification feature.

Let's frame the issue another way: What's Stack Overflow really for? Is it for people to ask questions and get answers? Or is it just a gamified Wikipedia?

SO has hurt the industry more than helped, I believe.

If a question gets asked more, maybe having more indexed landing pages for it for search engines will make it easier to find. It seems to be a popular question after all! Why limit yourself to just one answer?

Theoretically it's better to have all the answers in one place instead of scattered about, so that you can compare and contrast them. In practice it's far from ideal. Often a new question will generate a fresh take on an answer, and the diversity would be welcome.

If there's a subtle difference between the "duplicate" question and the older one, you can edit it to highlight the difference. Unfortunately that's hard to do, and you're unlikely to get the reopen votes even if you do a good job.

However, I wish there was a place as fantastically focused on good discussion.

It's certainly staying on track, but it's worth noting that many track-related analogies are pejoratives that focus on the way that you can't steer vehicles that go on tracks. I suspect an inordinate amount of incoming traffic to Stack Exchange is for information that only Stack Exchange apparently thinks (not just by the closing, but by the choice of words in explaining the reason for the closing) is not particularly valuable. Methinks that's evidence that the community governance has become an echo chamber - otherwise one should think that the people running this company would have identified a gap in the market that they could be exploiting by now.

Closed question: http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/2254/what-are...

Open Question: http://www.slant.co/topics/1150/~what-are-the-best-keyboards...

>Only some minor points, for the rest I really like the interface and functionality:

Thanks :) Do you like what we did with the sources? (example: http://bit.ly/1va9Aj6. The favicons act like tabs if you didn't notice)

- it's a tad confusing that in a list with questions every question has 3 links. Two of them are the same (queston title itself 'See All Options') so I'd remove the latter as it doesn't really add anything useful imo.

Good point. I'll double check with the analytics in the morning and see if we can simplify.

- it's not clear to me what the 'Best' sorting option means

It's very opaque at the moment as I'm experimenting with various sorting algorithms almost weekly. Once I nail something down I'll work on the UI transparency.

- a built-in way to link questions wouldn't be bad. For example there's a 'What are the best over-ear headphones under $200?' but also a 'What are the best over/on ear headphones around $300?' and in the latter the Sennheiser HD598 wins while it doesn't in the former. Something like a 'This is Related To' button which then pops up something similar to SO's duplicate question window.

We're building this! Not only "this is related to" but the ability to easily sync/add pro's from one occurrence of an option to another. (Yep, I'm aware of the potential issues with changing context, it's not going to be an auto sync, more like "suggested pros/cons/sources")

- which reminds me: not sure if it can be done but eventually you'll probably need a way to remove or rather merge duplicates

This is part of the same flagging project I'm in the middle of.

- just figured that after adding a pro, I still have to vote for it. It would make sense to do this automatically?

I keep going back and forth on this. A lot of people add pros/cons to be good community members, not necessarily due to them personally agreeing with them. I think it will end up being a checkbox that's enabled by default.

Thanks so much for taking the time to help us out! I'll keep working away until you describe Slant as "amazing" instead of "ok" :)

(btw if you want to help us shape the product even further we have a meta.slant.co)

oh yes, that's nice. Bug (on FF) though: the favicon disappears after having clicked on a tabs.

Your effort/enthusiasm sounds good for the rest :]. I'll check meta.

I removed that option, thanks for pointing that out. We have a long way to go on the moderation side of things.

Anything else you don't like/wish we had?

- it's a tad confusing that in a list with questions every question has 3 links. Two of them are the same (queston title itself 'See All Options') so I'd remove the latter as it doesn't really add anything useful imo.

- it's not clear to me what the 'Best' sorting option means

- a built-in way to link questions wouldn't be bad. For example there's a 'What are the best over-ear headphones under $200?' but also a 'What are the best over/on ear headphones around $300?' and in the latter the Sennheiser HD598 wins while it doesn't in the former. Something like a 'This is Related To' button which then pops up something similar to SO's duplicate question window.

- which reminds me: not sure if it can be done but eventually you'll probably need a way to remove or rather merge duplicates

- just figured that after adding a pro, I still have to vote for it. It would make sense to do this automatically?

It does this:

http://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/43179/how-can-i-r...

And it's officially supported:

https://blog.quora.com/Making-Sharing-Better

But you still need to sign up/in in to casually browse.

>And is this a bad practice?

It's pretty user hostile which is why I personally never used the site.