closed as duplicate killed the site. it's important to not have duplicates, but editors got trigger happy with it, so questions that were similar but different were getting closed. even questions that mention the similar one in the question as being similar but distinct get closed. a duplicate question 6 years later where libraries and patterns have been deprecated is closed as a dupe, even though the answer isn't relevant.
anyway, that's one issue, among others, that make the site ossified.
Wouldn't it have been more useful to merge duplicates?
Even framing the same question in different ways is useful. If someone posts a Duplicate, adding that to a list of "alternative questions" that is collapsed by default on the original post might have been a better approach.
It also takes away the whole "your question is worthless" dynamic that closing a question raises.
They occasionally merge duplicate questions. The results are awful because half the answers will refer to details not mentioned in the retained question.
I think that speaking to a larger culture issue and reputation for the site.
I never asked a question on SO, though I used it as a reference often. I had this idea in my head that to ask a proper question that wouldn’t get moderated away or obliterated by the community, I would have to spend significant time and energy researching how to ask appropriate questions, and provide a bunch of supporting details that proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that I did my due diligence before asking.
I guess at the end of the day this means I didn’t actually _need_ to ask a question, but also means some useful discussions and interesting answers to problems I solved, that I’m sure others have, don’t haven’t answers out in the wild.
I tried answering a few questions on SO and it quicly dawned on me that I’d better create a PR to the original docs. SO would have a better appeal for me if it was a Wiki like Arch Wiki. With a comment/question system like Google docs.
yeah I think that's the move that stack overflow should take. at some point the site became adversarial and not cooperative. when someone comes to you and says I have this problem and I want to fix it, please help me, and you respond No, you're wrong for having that problem and I won't help you, it's no small wonder that the site goes bad.
anyway, that's one issue, among others, that make the site ossified.