> The original idea of SO was building a knowledge repository, and that meant no duplication and pruning it endlessly
This is not true as I recall. On Joel and Jeff's podcast, Joel in particular was in favour of having lots of variants of the same question answered repeatedly. His rationale was that if people didn't find the golden original question, there was a reason for that (e.g. it's not a real duplicate, or it's a different frame of thinking about the problem shared by other people), and adding the supposed duplicate would mean that other people who search for it - and would similarly fail to find the golden original - would land on the supposed duplicate. Net win.
But this was in tension with cheap karma farmers. SO was structured as a points economy, but in any case anything with points rewards motivates some people to play the game of collecting points. A cheap way of farming points is to ask trivial questions then answer them yourself, or participate in an implicit network of people asking and answering trivial questions. How do you cut that out? Have canonical versions of the trivial questions, redirect people to them while asking, and motivate deduplication.
> Stackoverflow is sort of like the anti-experts-exchange (minus the nausea-inducing sleaze and quasi-legal search engine gaming) meets wikipedia meets programming reddit. It is by programmers, for programmers, with the ultimate intent of collectively increasing the sum total of good programming knowledge in the world. No matter what programming language you use, or what operating system you call home. Better programming is our goal.
> What kind of questions are appropriate? Well, thanks to the tagging system, we can be rather broad with that. As long as questions are appropriately tagged, I think it’s okay to be off topic as long as what you’re asking about is of interest to people who make software. But it does have to be a question. Stack Overflow isn’t a good place for imponderables, or public service announcements, or vague complaints, or storytelling.
With standard fraud detection systems especially since you need to accumulate karma before interacting so by the time a user can do damage you have plenty information about its network that you can comb for anomalies and patterns
This is not true as I recall. On Joel and Jeff's podcast, Joel in particular was in favour of having lots of variants of the same question answered repeatedly. His rationale was that if people didn't find the golden original question, there was a reason for that (e.g. it's not a real duplicate, or it's a different frame of thinking about the problem shared by other people), and adding the supposed duplicate would mean that other people who search for it - and would similarly fail to find the golden original - would land on the supposed duplicate. Net win.
But this was in tension with cheap karma farmers. SO was structured as a points economy, but in any case anything with points rewards motivates some people to play the game of collecting points. A cheap way of farming points is to ask trivial questions then answer them yourself, or participate in an implicit network of people asking and answering trivial questions. How do you cut that out? Have canonical versions of the trivial questions, redirect people to them while asking, and motivate deduplication.