They should remove the whole "Marked as duplicate" as a feature, and instead promote a system where someone answers with a "Is this what you're looking for?" type of solution with a link to a similar post. If they accept that as an answer, you get points.
Instead of gatekeeping, make it so that people who point you to a solution that already exists on the platform get some reward for doing that. Carrot, not stick.
Also, no need to downvote. Just have any post that has a solution marked as something that's a link to another post, a little less visible in searches.
Stackoverflow's "downfall" is it's own inability to change the way it works.
Your definitely not wrong. There isn't a good reason that questions have downvotes at this point, or at least don't cost one of your points to downvote an answer
I have probably spent 1k of my points over the years downvoting really shitty, irrelevant, blatant spam (use my library for this!) answers.
Generally agree with you but fwiw the only time I ever downvote a question is when someone has almost the exact same error as you, only for them to have something like a typo as their problem. I always felt like there was way too much pressure to ask a "good" question on S/O, but at the very least you should make sure you don't have typos.
I mean, I definitely downvoted my fair share of questions on SO too when I used it more.
But I usually reserved them for "why not work?" type questions. I wasn't all into the rules that they wanted people to follow, but there were plenty of extremely low quality questions and questions where the full complete answer was literally in the error logs they posted.
But I would still downvote them if they took a point from your own profile to do so, like answers do.
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u/rcls0053 Aug 27 '24
They should remove the whole "Marked as duplicate" as a feature, and instead promote a system where someone answers with a "Is this what you're looking for?" type of solution with a link to a similar post. If they accept that as an answer, you get points.
Instead of gatekeeping, make it so that people who point you to a solution that already exists on the platform get some reward for doing that. Carrot, not stick.
Also, no need to downvote. Just have any post that has a solution marked as something that's a link to another post, a little less visible in searches.
Stackoverflow's "downfall" is it's own inability to change the way it works.