The original post uses “roll-up” instead of “catch-all” for some reason.
There is a long-festering problem in some tags where some questions are closed by dupehammers, using a single roll-up question as the duplicate target. A “roll-up” question is defined here as a question trying to cover multiple minor topics within one question and a set of answers. So this Java question about null pointer exceptions does not qualify, as it is about a single topic.
A prime example would be this regex roll-up which has a large number of duplicates. This was by design.
Questions that are clear duplicates, but you can’t find one quickly.
To be fair, PHP and other tags have such roll-ups (example), and I have participated in hammering them as such. And there are a lot of questions that are low quality, where the temptation is to simply close them as the duplicates of the roll-up. I mean, it answers the question, doesn’t it?
The problem is that this has started to promote two undesirable community actions:
Lazy closure
Dupehammers are a “one and done” action. Moreover, there is a belief is that these questions answer all the “core” elements and are therefore “useful” in low quality situations. The question for regex theoretically covers all symbols used within, so why isn’t that useful? But this type of closure assumes that the roll-up covers all cases. The danger of dupehammers has always been that the target question doesn’t really cover a specific use case. Lazy closure doesn’t even bother to find that out first. Thus it becomes the action of choice for dupehammer users. It’s problematic, but the community largely self-regulates this so it’s not been a major issue. A low quality question can be closed for many other reasons beyond duplicate.
Tag gatekeeping
This action is the more problematic one. What we’ve been seeing for some time are “brigades” (for lack of any better term) of users who are committed to ensuring that only questions they see fit in a tag are open. Thus we get a number of these:
What this has turned into is not laziness, but deliberate actions, where we see the same users doing this over and over. Or, to quote a comment under the question I got the screenshot from:
I invite readers to examine the earlier question and ask themselves if any question could possibly be a duplicate of that question. If the answer is “no”, please vote to reopen (and leave a comment giving your reasons for doing so). Closing this question, in this way, is sending a clear message to Peter, the OP (the polite version): “get lost”. This catch-all closing of questions having a “regex” tag must stop.
I don’t know that it sends a “get lost” message, as much as it sends another message moderators have been fighting against for years: RTFM. What these roll-ups have become, in essence, is another “fine” manual for users to read. Duplicate closure like this is basically throwing a volume of information at users and telling them “Figure out what, in this giant pile of information, answers your question.” That’s not useful.
It also effectively acts as a veto for anything any dupehammer user sees fit to close it as. Roll-up questions worked well as a philosophy for a long time, but (as the old saying goes), this is why we can’t have nice things.
The rule
The rule would be as follows:
Roll-up questions are useful in general, but may not provide enough guidance to users with specific questions, and serve as poor signposts to users looking for specific answers. Please use only specific questions for duplicate closure.
FAQ
- Moderators would enforce this new rule. No system changes would be made.
- Moderators would find out about violations via flags. Moderators already get an autoflag for closure disputes, and users could flag instances of this rule being violated.
- Enforcement would follow standard enforcement: A warning on the first offense and suspension for subsequent violations.
- Any other duplicate closure would still be allowed. If someone feels strongly enough that it’s a duplicate, they should go find that specific question. Moderators will still not solve duplicate disputes, but the list of roll-up questions isn’t long, and it’s a fairly objective standard to enforce.
Totally agree, it’s not just toxic either. I don’t find it useful anymore. My account is from the first 6 months of the site’s existence, opened in early 2009. I still get upvotes on questions I asked back then.
For the past several years though it’s been a last resort for me to post something there, and nothing I’ve posted in the past 5 years even has a single answer on it. They’ve not been closed as duplicates or anything, just no answers.
I go chatgpt now, it’s often wrong with those kinds of questions but usually gets me close enough to fix my issue.
This suggests your questions are a factor. Perhaps the topic is too niche? Perhaps the questions are too specialized?
Recently I gave SO a try with a tricky but low-hanging fruit question, and the problem I faced was the exact opposite of yours: I received too many comments and answers. The problem was that 99% of those replying were clearly clueless newbies and seemed to be piling on to try to farm reputation points. Some of them were even not reading the question at all, using a strawmen of sorts to dump the answer they had, and even presenting code snippets that were broken.
Yeah, I think they were too niche, my point was that I was able to find answers for everything else before I had to resort to posting a question. One example was I had found a JS bug in Safari and was seeking a workaround. All I got was a couple of comments agreeing and then one a year later saying it was now fixed in the latest version.
That’s not a SO problem per se. Some projects do use SO as their semi-official customer support channel, but in general posting a question on SO is not supposed to be better than posting a question on Reddit: you get what you paid for.