Yes. ;D
'You can only post once every 90 minutes.'I posted my first question trying to be very specific and described my troubleshooting efforts leading up to the post. It got a response about 2 minutes later claiming it was a duplicate and already answered in another thread. When I went to that thread, it was only slightly related and completely unhelpful - but my thread was now closed.It is typical, unfortunately. There are a lot of "reputation" gamers, who post answers and close questions as duplicates even when they're not (and often also close questions because they themselves do not understand the question, especially when the question is hard). They do not really do it to help others, but to get more "reputation". The entire site is based on the idea that "best answers get voted to the top", but popularity and quality do not correlate much (and causate even less).
Is this normal Stack Exchange?
There are a lot of "reputation" gamers, who post answers and close questions as duplicates even when they're not (and often also close questions because they themselves do not understand the question, especially when the question is hard). They do not really do it to help others, but to get more "reputation". The entire site is based on the idea that "best answers get voted to the top", but popularity and quality do not correlate much (and causate even less).
So you're going to post it here so we can possibly answer it, or any of us with SE accounts can downvote the guilty, right? ;D ;D
Tim
It's a downside of gamification: people start treating the reputation points as their score, and the reason they participate is the dopamine release that occurs when you increase your score.There are a lot of "reputation" gamers, who post answers and close questions as duplicates even when they're not (and often also close questions because they themselves do not understand the question, especially when the question is hard). They do not really do it to help others, but to get more "reputation". The entire site is based on the idea that "best answers get voted to the top", but popularity and quality do not correlate much (and causate even less).Struggling to understand such a motivation. Bizarre :-//
The person that closed the thread is now responding via comments to the original thread. Since is it closed, he is the only one that can participate I am guessing.Members with high enough reputation score can see and comment on it. Members with even higher can vote to reopen. Members with even higher can insta-reopen, and so on.
Not sure why he simply does not open it back up for a public discussion.
Members with high enough reputation score can see and comment on it. Members with even higher can vote to reopen. Members with even higher can insta-reopen, and so on.
It's not even clear how voting to close a question could help someone game the system to their advantage.I don't know either, maybe to limit inflation :)
As a reasonably high-ranking and long-tenured contributor, I can't say I have any evidence of reputation gaming.I (https://stackoverflow.com/users/1475978/nominal-animal) stopped contributing a year ago because "high-ranking and long-tenured contributors" typically refuse to acknowledge or correct their errors, and instead either delete their answer, or let it stand, whichever yields them the most reputation points. The quality of the information does not matter to them; their reputation rank overrides any such considerations. This is the reputation game.
It's not even clear how voting to close a question could help someone game the system to their advantage.You have severely misunderstood the argument here. It is not that some people game the system; it is about gamification of advice and help.
However, the better-quality stuff is often great, and upvotes are a great way to discover such stuff.Given that only one third of my answers at stackoverflow have more than two upvotes, and one fifth has zero, by that logic my answers are utter shit, not worth reading.
In terms of quality of answers i do not see how SO differs from any other forums.
Stack overflow is at best and by design useful for "which button do I press to cause the floggle to snurf" questions.
The answers are usually of the form "my fluggle snarfed when I pressed Z at the full moon", spelling differences intended, and note the absence of cause and effect.
There is very little understanding of principles visible; instead monkey-see-monkey-do responses are preferred.
Exactly, and the "stack overflow coding" (well described earlier in this thread) works the same. I resort to "SO programming" paradigm when I have a problem that
1) is small
2) I hate
3) I have to get done quickly
4) Exactness, quality and maintainability are of no interest whatsoever
Surprisingly often, copypasting together 100 lines of code from Stack Overflow seemingly does the job I hate and I can go on to something I like to do properly.
These score-seeking contributors are especially keen to close questions they cannot answer, because a secondary tactic is to stop others from gaining "score" when they themselves cannot.
Is this normal Stack Exchange?
Since all of human knowledge is on Google and their question is unlikely to be cutting edge, there is a Google reply out there. All the user has to do is look.
Sometimes Google gives you thousands of results that don't answer the question, or thousands of similar but not the same, or thousands of wrong answers, or worse still vague answers that don't actually tell you what the answer are just that your stupid for asking etc. Then there's the thousands of answers from morons quoting documentation they don't understand etc....
Mr Google has it's uses but sometimes a generic search engine is not what you need.
I completely lost my shit when a self-professed "MPI expert" on StackOverflow with high reputation score told new MPI programmers that asynchronous sends/receives (MPI_Isend() (https://www.open-mpi.org/doc/v3.0/man3/MPI_Isend.3.php), MPI_Irecv() (https://www.open-mpi.org/doc/v3.0/man3/MPI_Irecv.3.php)) should not be used, because they tend to cause deadlocks.
I forgot to mention that the original asker was specifically trying to learn about async messaging using MPI_Irecv()/MPI_Isend(), and the response from that high-score dude was "don't do that, it's bad; I'm a high-reputation MPI expert, and we never do that in practice".I completely lost my shit when a self-professed "MPI expert" on StackOverflow with high reputation score told new MPI programmers that asynchronous sends/receives (MPI_Isend() (https://www.open-mpi.org/doc/v3.0/man3/MPI_Isend.3.php), MPI_Irecv() (https://www.open-mpi.org/doc/v3.0/man3/MPI_Irecv.3.php)) should not be used, because they tend to cause deadlocks.
But, for a new user, lacking a great deal of insight into messages, that might be a perfectly reasonable answer.
Take a simple example: Serial IO. We can have polled input or interrupt driven input with a queue. If a new user came by and asked "how do I implement serial IO", we probably wouldn't give the interrupt driven answer.Right. I would probably write a three-stage answer: use a library; examine existing implementations to understand blocking I/O, nonblocking I/O or polled I/O, interrupt driven, and DMA driven; then implement your own from scratch. Progress as deep into the rabbit hole as you wish, forking into the different approaches, or stay with the library approach if that part is not a key point in the learning experience yet.