"They have a clear purpose: they want the site to be useful"

Hmmm, you might want to re-think that one. I can't see how 200,000 questions(and answers) about how to do a for-loop in python(or insert here your fav language) is considered useful.

Don't try to sell me the "report as duplicate" functionality. It is rarely(compared to the content) used. And the reason is simple, look at the people who answer these questions! Some have a reputation in the hundred thousands. Rep farming at work!

SO is a great tool, but I think it's prime time is well behind us. Right now it has become a substitute for Google, by Javascript(mostly) kiddies, that somehow can't find the time to google their trivial questions - let alone read the documentation.

IMO unless they begin to "punish" such behavior, the quality of SO will continue to decline and people like me will begin to distance themselves even more, from this excellent(at some point) site.

EDIT: typo

> And the reason is simple, look at the people who answer these questions! Some have a reputation in the hundreds. Rep farming at work!

I was confused by this statement. Doesn't a reputation in the hundreds put you distinctively in the lower end of reasonably active users?

You'll need to go page 1300 or so before you see users with three-digit rep: http://stackoverflow.com/users?tab=reputation&filter=all

True. I meant hundred thousands! Sorry.

It is interesting that you think "report as duplicate" is rarely used. It seems to me that it is very often used. In fact, it seems that it is at times used more liberally than it should be on questions that aren't really duplicates.

As I said, rarely relatively to the duplicate content. Liberally? Definitely not! Most people(which is understandable, I guess) don't want to lose the opportunity to gain some more rep, even if they know that the question has been already answered a thousand times. I am most active in the `python` tag. At least there, I could list way too many examples.

Oftentimes where I've seen duplicated content marked, the question suggested doesn't adequately or fully answer the new question, which may have an advanced or updated (or just different but valuable) slant.

Keeping only the first iteration of a question is seriously detrimental to SE.

I agree completely with what you say. Unfortunately you're talking about something completely different.

I'm not talking about all the instances of posts that get marked as duplicate, neither about those that are marked as duplicate when they shouldn't.

I am talking about those that should be marked, because for all intents and purposes are identical to a thousand other answers, but unfortunately they don't get treated as such.

The reason? Reputation farming plain and simple. It's not even something that's controversial. It's happening all the time and many people like me, voice their opinions, instead of seeking reputation points. That's all.

I have a favorite screw driver. On occasion, I use the back of it as a hammer and it works quite well in that capacity on some jobs.

The lengthy discussions have not only been interesting, they've often given me a swath of new ideas and approaches to a problem I haven't previously considered. Human brains don't function in binary and often move to ternary or quaternary switching or more to yield to a better result.

SO's conformity has a hopelessly awkward enforcement that is both unnatural for human beings and, is ultimately, Not Constructive. That's not my opinion; as the commenters on this thread have repeatedly shown, it's empirically observed fact.

Programming (hell, technology in generally) should be humane as they (should) ultimately serve humans and is advanced by humans. I refuse to not act like one.

>Lengthy discussions can be interesting, but they don't solve problems.

The problem is that SE's criterion for a "lengthy discussion" is so moronically short that valuable and constructive questions are getting killed off. I echo the sentiment elsewhere in this thread that I have many a time had a question answered in a thread marked as "not constructive".

It's downright wrong and insulting.

Their philosophy is that some people are better suited to judge usefulness than others. They apparently believe that a one-developer, one-vote system would not judge such questions "correctly."

> They apparently believe that a one-developer, one-vote system would not judge such questions "correctly."

I find this dichotomy fascinating.

They do a fair job of justifying that democratic voting doesn't generally identify useful questions, but then again the site's main feature is a one-person, one-vote system.

>Lengthy discussions can be interesting, but they don't solve problems. They're not useful.

Eh? Discussions between experts is exactly how difficult problems are typically solved, in reality.

Not in the reality I live in. Typically, difficult problems are solved by one expert sitting down and doing some hard work. They may ask others about specific points, but certainly not the kind of thing that gets closed as "not constructive" on SO (or used to, the system has recently changed) - things like "What's better for webapps, Python or Java?", "Do student projects influence job prospects?" or "Should I go back to academia?"

I agree with you that certain hard work is best done by one person, if we're talking considering problems with computationally deterministic solutions to be difficult (and ignoring 'standing on the shoulders of giants' effect) then you're probably right.

But, for the majority of difficult problems which don't have single fixed solutions, i.e. real-world problems, I wouldn't give a single expert working in isolation the time of day.

(The questions you suggest are straw men. I'll only say that I wouldn't want to see those on SE either, but I don't consider those are the style of questions under discussion here.)

Ha! Useful seems to be their main criteria for closing questions.