llm/5daab79e-f20f-476c-ab87-82c7ff678250/batch-1-b233d1a0-e0a5-441c-97a5-d70b64cae109-input.json
You are a comment classifier. Given a list of topics and a batch of comments, assign each comment to up to 3 of the most relevant topics.
TOPICS (use these 1-based indices):
1. Toxic moderation culture
2. LLMs replacing Stack Overflow
3. Duplicate question closures
4. Community hostility toward newcomers
5. Question quality standards
6. Knowledge base vs help forum debate
7. Future of LLM training data
8. Reddit and Discord as alternatives
9. Gamification and reputation systems
10. Outdated answers problem
11. SO sale to private equity
12. Google search integration decline
13. Expert knowledge preservation
14. GitHub Discussions adoption
15. Elitist gatekeeping behavior
16. Human interaction loss
17. Question saturation theory
18. Moderator power dynamics
19. AI-generated content concerns
20. Community decline timeline
COMMENTS TO CLASSIFY:
[
{
"id": "46494710",
"text": "I think this \"first opportunity to be the bully\" thing is spot on. Everybody learns from being bullied. Some of us learn not to do it when we have power; others just learn how."
}
,
{
"id": "46487933",
"text": "They clearly aren't asking for the question to be resurrected."
}
,
{
"id": "46490389",
"text": "Quite frankly you are wrong. Jeff and Joel spoke about their goals for very harsh moderation in their podcast while they were still building SO. The moderation from the very beginning was a direct result of the culture they created and it was completely intentional."
}
,
{
"id": "46490527",
"text": "Quite frankly you have missed the point of my comment.\n\nThe late 2010s moderator drama I was talking about was beyond the strict question curation. When StackOverflow expanded into StackExchange and started trying to be another Quora the moderation grew beyond curating technical questions. For years there was needless moderator drama and arguments over how the moderator team should run that were spilling over into social media everywhere."
}
,
{
"id": "46483954",
"text": "> The fundamental value proposition of SO is getting an answer to a question\n\nI read an interview once with one of the founders of SO. They said the main value stackoverflow provided wasn't to the person who asked the question. It was for the person who googled it later and found the answer. This is why all the moderation pushes toward deleting duplicates of questions, and having a single accepted answer. They were primarily trying to make google searches more effective for the broader internet. Not provide a service for the question-asker or answerer.\n\nSad now though, since LLMs have eaten this pie."
}
,
{
"id": "46484884",
"text": "> This is why all the moderation pushes toward deleting duplicates of questions, and having a single accepted answer.\n\nMy personal single biggest source of frustration with SO has been outdated answers that are locking out more modern and correct answers. There are so many things for which there is no permanently right answer over time. It feels like SO started solidifying and failed to do the moderation cleaning and maintenance needed to keep it current and thriving. The over-moderation you described helps people for a short time but then doesn’t help the person who googles much later. I’ve also constantly wished that bad answers would get hidden or cleaned out, and that accepted answers that weren’t very good would get more actively changed to better ones that showed up, it’s pretty common to see newer+better answers than the accepted one."
}
,
{
"id": "46485394",
"text": "> outdated answers that are locking out more modern and correct answers. There are so many things for which there is no permanently right answer over time.... I’ve also constantly wished that bad answers would get hidden or cleaned out, and that accepted answers that weren’t very good would get more actively changed to better ones that showed up, it’s pretty common to see newer+better answers than the accepted one.\n\nOkay, but who's going to arbitrate that ? It's not like anyone was going to delete answers with hundreds of upvotes because someone thought it was wrong or outdated. And there are literally about a million questions per moderator, and moderators are not expected to be subject matter experts on anything in particular. Re-asking the question doesn't actually help, either, except sometimes when the question is bad. (It takes serious community effort to make projects like https://stackoverflow.com/questions/45621722 work.)\n\nThe Trending sort was added to try to ameliorate this,"
}
,
{
"id": "46489700",
"text": "Reading the rest of this thread, it sounds like moderation truly was SO’s downfall, and almost everyone involved seems to agree the site became extremely anti-social. Not sure I’ve ever seen the word ‘toxic’ this many times in one thread before.\n\nAnyway, that is a good question you asked, one that they didn’t figure out. But if there are enough people to ask questions and search for answers, then aren’t there enough people to manage the answers? SO already had serious community effort, it just wasn’t properly focused by the UX options they offer. Obviously you need to crowd-source the decisions that can’t scale to mods, while figuring out the incentive system to reduce gaming. I’m not claiming this is easy, in fact I’m absolutely certain this is not easy to do, but SO brought too little too late to a serious problem that fundamentally limited and reduced the utility of the site over time.\n\nModeration should have been aimed squarely at making the site friendly, and community should be m"
}
,
{
"id": "46490364",
"text": "> Moderation should have been aimed squarely at making the site friendly, and community should be moderating the content entirely, for exactly the reasons you point out - mods aren’t the experts on the content.\n\nThe community was the ones moderating the content in its entirety (with a very small fraction of that moderation being done by the mods - the ones with a diamond after their name... after all, they're part of the community too). Community moderation of content was crowdsourced.\n\nHowever, the failing was that not enough of the community was doing that moderation.\n\nhttps://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/432658/2024-a-year-...\n\nNote the \"Questions closed\" and \"Questions reopened\".\n\nCompare this to https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/340815/2016-a-year-...\n\nThe tools that diamond (elected) moderators had was the \"make the site friendly\" by removing comments and banning users.\n\nThe \"some of the answers should have been deleted\" ran counter to the mod (diamond mod this time ht"
}
,
{
"id": "46490517",
"text": "> every attempt at answering a question - is valid and should remain.\n\nYeah this is describing a policy that seems like it’s causing some of the problem I’m talking about. SO’s current state today is evidence that not every attempt at answering a question should ‘remain’. But of course it depends on what exactly we mean by that too. Over time, valid attempts that don’t help should arguably be removed from the default view, especially when high quality answers are there, but they don’t have to be deleted and they can be shown to some users. One of the things it sounds like SO didn’t identify or figure out is how to separate the idea of an answer being valid from the idea the answer should remain visible. It would serve the site well to work on making people who try to answer feel validated, while at the same time not necessarily showing every word of it to every user, right?"
}
,
{
"id": "46491025",
"text": "That would entail a significant redesign of the underlying display engine... and an agreement of that being the correct direction at the corporate level.\n\nUnfortunately, after Jeff left I don't think there was that much upper management level support for \"quality before quantity\" After the sale it feels like it was \"quantity and engagement will follow\" and then \"engagement through any means\". Deleting and hiding questions or answers that aren't high quality... really would mean making most of the site hidden and that wouldn't help engagement at all."
}
,
{
"id": "46494424",
"text": "yes I noticed this as well, over the past few years, its happened again and again that the \"Top Answer\" ends up being useless and I found myself constantly sorting the answers by \"Recent\" to find the ones that are actually useful and relevant"
}
,
{
"id": "46486424",
"text": "They introduced recent-votes-count-more, perhaps five years ago."
}
,
{
"id": "46485250",
"text": "Having gotten used to SO, I was shocked when I found I could mark multiple answers correct on AskMetafilter. It felt like an innovation."
}
,
{
"id": "46488000",
"text": "> There are so many things for which there is no permanently right answer over time.\n\nYeah it's doubly stupid because the likelihood of becoming outdated is one of the reasons they don't allow \"recommendation\" questions. So they know that it's an issue but just ignore it for programming questions."
}
,
{
"id": "46485066",
"text": "> This is why all the moderation pushes toward deleting duplicates of questions, and having a single accepted answer.\n\nHaving duplicates of the question is precisely why people use LLMs instead of StackOverflow. The majority of all users lack the vocabulary to properly articulate their problems using the jargon of mathematicians and programmers. Prior to LLMs, my use case for StackOverflow was something like this:\n\n30 minutes trying (and failing) to use the right search terms to articulate the problem (remember, there was no contextual understanding, so if you used a word with two meanings and one of those meanings was more popular, you’d have to omit it using the exclusion operator).\n\n30 minutes reading through the threads I found (half of which will have been closed or answered by users who ignored some condition presented by the OP).\n\n5 minutes on implementation.\n\n2 minutes pounding my head on my desk because it shouldn’t have been that hard.\n\nWith an LLM, if the problem has been do"
}
,
{
"id": "46485404",
"text": "> Having duplicates of the question is precisely why people use LLMs instead of StackOverflow. The majority of all users lack the vocabulary to properly articulate their problems using the jargon of mathematicians and programmers.\n\nYes; so the idea is they fail to find the existing question, and ask it again, and get marked as a duplicate; and then everyone else with the same problem can search, possibly find the new duplicate version , and get automatically redirected to the main version with high quality answers."
}
,
{
"id": "46485675",
"text": "Yes but that only works if the questions are identical . Often however they are merely similar, but closed as duplicates nonetheless."
}
,
{
"id": "46485696",
"text": "No, that is completely wrong. It is exactly because the questions are not identical that the system works. That is what allows for multiple versions of a popular, important question to catch attention from search engines, and send everyone to the same, correct place.\n\nPerhaps your objection is that, because the target question is not literally identical (for example, maybe a code sample has different variable names, or the setup has an irrelevant difference in the container type used for a collection, etc.) that the answers don't literally answer the new version of the question. That is completely missing the point . It's not a forum. The Q&A format is just the way that information is being presented. Fixing the issue in your, personal code is not, and never has been, the goal."
}
,
{
"id": "46485793",
"text": "You are positing that only questions with cosmetic or extraneous differences are marked as duplicates.\n\nThat's not the case. As a maintainer of a popular project who has engaged with thousands of Qs on SO related to that project, I've seen many Qs marked as duplicate where the actual answer would be different in a non-trivial manner. When I look at who all moderated on those Qs, they are usually users who haven't contributed to that topic at SO."
}
,
{
"id": "46485909",
"text": "> That's not the case.\n\nYes, it is. I have been active on both the main and meta sites for many years. I have seen so many of these complaints and they overwhelmingly boil down to that. And I have gotten so unbelievably stressed out on so many occasions trying to explain to people why their trivial objections are missing the point of the site completely.\n\n> I've seen many Qs marked as duplicate where the actual answer would be different in a non-trivial manner.\n\nPlease feel free to cite specific examples. I'll be happy to explain policy.\n\n> When I look at who all moderated on those Qs, they are usually users who haven't contributed to that topic at SO.\n\nThat is generally irrelevant."
}
,
{
"id": "46488853",
"text": "Have you considered that the problem here is not insufficient explanation of policy?\n\nThere's this thing that some programmers do a lot, where it's the users who are wrong. Using it wrong, approaching it wrong, thinking about it wrong, wanting the wrong thing. Just not understanding enough the masterwork that the programmers created.\n\nWhat this view misses is that the users are the point. If one user gets it wrong, sure, maybe it's the user. But broadly the point of software is to serve and adapt to users, and developers who forget that are starting an argument that they cannot win in the long term.\n\nIt's especially wild to see you talking like this on an article about how Stack Overflow is just about dead. It needed changes a decade ago, but everyone just hunkered down and defended the existing approach. The policies you are somehow still defending are a big part of what doomed the site."
}
,
{
"id": "46489685",
"text": "The site was a consensus of what Jeff and Joel and their associated blogging communities who started posting on Stack Overflow wanted. There was some tension between those two communities about what should be there, but that's where it started.\n\nIn the early days, onboarding was done fairly actively with a reasonable amount of the community participating in answering and community moderation - shaping it.\n\nThat portion of the community - both answering and moderating was key for onboarding.\n\nHowever, as Stack Overflow got popular, a smaller and smaller percent of the community was actively answering and participating in community moderation - and onboarding of new people became more and more difficult.\n\nHere I lay the responsibility nearly completely at the feet of corporate. The friction for moderation was increased at the same time that it became popular and thus harder for the community to moderate.\n\nMaking it easier moderate and help people understand the site meant that either you"
}
,
{
"id": "46490176",
"text": "What you're missing is that random people who come to Stack Overflow to ask a question (of a sort that doesn't meet the site's standards) are not my \"users\" . I don't care in the slightest about these metrics of \"dead-ness\", and showing them to me another hundred times will not change my mind about that.\n\nBecause from my perspective, it has never been about how many questions are asked per day, or how many ad impressions the site owners get. (I don't see a dime from it, after all.) From my perspective, way too many questions got asked. It is more than three times as many publicly visible and still-open questions, as there are articles on Wikipedia . For a scope of \"practical matters about writing code\", as compared to \"any real-world phenomenon important enough for reliable sources to have written about it\".\n\nI am not trying to win the argument about what people want. I am only establishing that the goal is legitimate, and that people who share that goal should be permitted to congrega"
}
,
{
"id": "46493539",
"text": "As a former Wikipedia administrator, I think one of the things that Wikipedia has done exactly right is to strongly prioritize readers first, editors second, and administrators third. The unofficial Wikipedia administrator symbol is a mop, because it's much more a position of responsibility than it is a position of power.\n\nI obviously think you and other user-hostile people should be permitted to congregate and accomplish something. What I object to in Stack Overflow's case is the site being taken over by people like that, serving themselves and their own preferences with such vigor that they alienated vast numbers of potential contributors, putting the site on a path of decline from which is unlikely to recover.\n\nEven by your own terms, having a place for some (conveniently unspecified) group to \"congregate in public and try to accomplish something\" looks certain to be a failure. However much you don't care about deadness or declining revenue, the people paying the bills surely do. St"
}
,
{
"id": "46492208",
"text": "Deadness is the symptom, not the cause. Users don't avoid SO because it's dead, but rather, SO is dead because users avoid it. It's up to you to figure out why users are avoiding it. Hint: They've been telling you quite loudly.\n\nThere's another thread on the front page about IPv6 where someone had a good analogy: IPv4 vs IPv6 is like Python 2 vs 3. The Python 2 diehards continued arguing furiously to an emptier and emptier room. They never felt they were proven wrong, and the intensity of the argument never diminished but the argument was with fewer and fewer people until they were just arguing with themselves as the world moved on without them.\n\nAnd that's exactly what happened to Stack Overflow, and you're one of those guys still trying to promote the use of Python 2.7 in 2026, after the horse is long gone. Everyone has left, the lights are off in the empty debate hall and you're standing there at the podium telling a bunch of chairs and desks why everyone actually agrees with you. Y"
}
,
{
"id": "46493803",
"text": "> It's up to you to figure out why users are avoiding it. Hint: They've been telling you quite loudly.\n\nNo, it is not up to me to figure that out. I have heard it said quite loudly many times, over a period of many years.\n\nWhat you are missing is: I. Do. Not. Care.\n\nThe goal was never for the site to be \"not dead\". The goal was for the site to host useful information that is readily found.\n\nThe site already has tons of useful information. But it's drowning in... much less useful information, and Google has become much worse (to some extent intentionally) at surfacing the good parts.\n\n> And that's exactly what happened to Stack Overflow, and you're one of those guys still trying to promote the use of Python 2.7 in 2026\n\nThis is a bizarre thing to say to me, of all people. I am always the one catching flak for telling people that 2.7 had to go, that the backwards-incompatible changes were vital, that the break wasn't radical enough, and that people were given way more time to switch over"
}
,
{
"id": "46494057",
"text": "> The goal was never for the site to be \"not dead\"\n\nok? fine then. If you think it's fine for the site to be dead then please stop spamming comments defending it. It doesn't need any defence to stay dead and such defence is not useful.\n\nResponse to child comment: no, you are not replying to people telling you why you need to care about a thing. You are mostly replying randomly throughout the thread and telling people why they are wrong."
}
,
{
"id": "46494286",
"text": "I am only responding to many people trying to explain why I should care about the thing I don't care about. The defense is useful because a) it being \"dead\" by these metrics is unimportant; b) people are blaming a community for mistreating them, when they came in without any intent of understanding or adapting to that community; c) other sites in this mold exist, and are trying to establish themselves."
}
,
{
"id": "46486025",
"text": "> Please feel free to cite specific examples. I'll be happy to explain policy.\n\nHow do I search for Qs closed as duplicates with a certain tag?"
}
,
{
"id": "46486145",
"text": "\"[tag] is:question duplicate:yes\"\n\nBut if you had a personal experience, it will be easier to look within your questions on your profile page."
}
,
{
"id": "46486471",
"text": "> But if you had a personal experience, it will be easier to look within your questions on your profile page.\n\nI answer Qs on this topic, not post them.\n\n----\n\nHere's an example I found:\n\nhttps://superuser.com/questions/1929615/\n(the canonical q is about extracting as mono, the closed q is about muting one channel)"
}
,
{
"id": "46490268",
"text": "You appear to have linked the canonical, which has a few duplicates marked. All are asking about isolating one channel , as far as I can tell. This canonical is literally titled \"ffmpeg: isolate one audio channel\". One of them also asks about \"downmixing\" to mono after isolating the channel (which I guess means marking the audio format as mono so that that isolated channel will play on both speakers), but that is trivial. And you see the same basic techniques offered in the answers: to use `-map-channel` or the `pan` audio filter. The other one explicitly wants a panned result, i.e. still stereo but only on one side; the logic for this is clear from the explanation in the canonical answer.\n\nThe point is to show the technique, not to meet individual exact needs. Stack Overflow doesn't need separate \"how do I get the second line of a file?\" and \"how do I get the third line of a file?\" questions."
}
,
{
"id": "46491204",
"text": "The dupe is what I linked.\nThe orig is https://superuser.com/questions/601972\n\nThe orig wants a mono output with one of the original channels as signal source. This involves downmixing i.e. rematrixing the audio.\n\nThe dupe want to just mute one of the channels, not repan it. One can't apply map_channel to do what the dupe wants.\n\nOne can use a couple of methods to achieve the dupe, including pan. But the syntax of pan needed for the dupe case is not the same as the orig, or deducible from it. They need to consult the docs (fortuitously, the dupe case is an illustrated example) or get a direct answer. The 'technique' shown in the orig is not intuitively adaptable to the dupe - one needs to know about the implicit muting that pan applies, which is not documented or evident in the orig answer. So it's not a duplicate of the source Q."
}
,
{
"id": "46493815",
"text": "> The dupe is what I linked. The orig is\n\nAh, I don't actually have a SuperUser account, so it was automatically redirecting me.\n\n> The 'technique' shown in the orig is not intuitively adaptable to the dupe\n\nIDK, it looks to me like I could figure it out pretty easily from what's written there, and I'm not by any means an ffmpeg expert."
}
,
{
"id": "46488895",
"text": "I do not remember any specific examples, but when I still used SO, I've come across many cases personally where a question closely matching a problem I had was closed as a duplicate of another question that asked about a related, but different problem and had an answer that was not appropriate for my problem and the supposedly duplicate question.\n\nThis significantly decreased the utility of clicking on SO links for me, to the point where I would avoid going to search results from SO first.\n\nThe comments here are teeming with others voicing similar experiences.\n\nIt is quite... something to read your response to this, which pretty much comes across as \"nu-uh!\", garnished with an appeal to \"policy\".\n\nI think your SO-specific bubble is a little different from most other people's. I've no doubt that overwhelmingly, the dupes are dupes, but on the other hand, the false positives you're discounting are overwhelming the user experience."
}
,
{
"id": "46490283",
"text": "> many cases personally where a question closely matching a problem I had was closed as a duplicate of another question that asked about a related, but different problem and had an answer that was not appropriate for my problem and the supposedly duplicate question.\n\nYes.\n\nWe consider that duplicate.\n\nBecause the point is whether the question is duplicate, not whether the problem is duplicate. The point is not to solve the problem, so it isn't interesting whether the question is \"appropriate to\" the problem. The point is to give you the information you need ."
}
,
{
"id": "46490846",
"text": "I don't understand how you can read all this and conclude that people get the information they need.\n\nIn fact, your latest response is so far out that I've started to seriously wonder if you're trying to troll. If you aren't: sorry, just trying to tell you how this comes across as absurdly disconnected. If you are: you're bad at trolling, or a master at satire. Either way, I'm outta here."
}
,
{
"id": "46491770",
"text": "How does \"give you the information you need\" mesh with \"The point is not to solve the problem\"? They seem like mutually exclusive goals for 95% of cases."
}
,
{
"id": "46493818",
"text": "> How does \"give you the information you need\" mesh with \"The point is not to solve the problem\"?\n\nThe same way that a K-12 education does."
}
,
{
"id": "46491064",
"text": "The \"nuh uh\" attitude also helps explain the usage graph drop. \"The users simply wanted the wrong thing than what the site is for\" is also something"
}
,
{
"id": "46494923",
"text": "^ this whole chain-of-interaction is a wonderful reminder of why I left SO: It was like seeing a movie trailer about a remake of some nearly forgotten B- horror film one was unfortunately allowed to watch when far too young.\n\nSpoiler warning for those who havent seen this movie before:\n\nCallous disregard for the utility and purpose of both the 'Q' and 'A' users; thinly veiled in a 'you don't get to tell me what i care about', wrapped in a 'my concept of how to moderate is just the way it is; if you don't like it, go F* yourself' package, trimmed with a ribbon of 'who do these Lusers that pay the bills think they are' directed at both the site owners (who write the checks to pay the bills) and all three relevant types of visitors, Q's, A's and those who neither ask, nor answer questions, but do see Advertisements and indirectly generate the income which the site owners use to write checks. But who cares?!, since Mods are not being paid (or paid well enough) to adjust a maladjusted conce"
}
,
{
"id": "46488067",
"text": "> Yes; so the idea is they fail to find the existing question, and ask it again, and get marked as a duplicate\n\nUsers would fail to find the existing question not because there was an abundance of poorly-worded questions, but because there was a dearth of questions asked using lay terminology that the user was likely to use.\n\nUsers were not searching for error codes but making naive preliminary searches like “XYZ doesn’t work” and then branching off from there. Having answers worded in a variety of ways allowed for greater odds that the user would find a question written the way he had worded his search.\n\nRedirecting users to an older answer also just added pointless friction compared to allowing for the answer from the original question to be reposted on the duplicate question, in the exceedingly rare instances\n\nI understand the motive behind wanting to exclude questions that are effectively just: “Do my work for me.” The issue is you have users actively telling you that the culling p"
}
,
{
"id": "46491859",
"text": "> to properly articulate their problems using the jargon of mathematicians and programmers\n\nI once distilled a real-life problem into mathematical language exactly like how the Introduction to Algorithms book would pose them only to have the quesiton immediately closed with the explanation \"don't post your CS homework\".\n\n(My employer at the time was very sensitive about their IP and being able to access the Internet from the work computer was already a miracle. I once sat through a whole day of InfoSec and diciplinary meetings for posting completely dummy bug repoduction code on Github."
}
,
{
"id": "46485870",
"text": "I think that's a great policy. I don't think anyone wants duplicate questions. The problem is moderation marking unrelated questions as duplicates.\n\nI'd say 9/10 times I find a direct match for my question on SO it's been closed as offtopic with links to one or more questions that are only superficially similar.\n\nThere are other problems that they don't even try to address. If 10 people ask the same question, why does only the first person to ask it get to choose the answer? Then lots of \"XY\" questions where the original asker didn't actually have problem X so selects an answer for Y, leaving the original X unsolved, and now all the duplicates only have an answer for Y too."
}
,
{
"id": "46488849",
"text": "> The problem is moderation marking unrelated questions as duplicates.\n\nThis problem isn't directly solvable (what counts as a \"duplicate\" is inherently subjective, and therefore mistakes/differences of opinion are inevitable).\n\nI think a deeper problem is that once a question becomes closed (for any reason), it's unlikely that it'll ever be reopened. The factors behind this are social (askers interpret close votes as signals that they should give up), cultural (there's not much training/feedback/guidelines about what \"duplicate\" means for those with voting privileges), and technical (there's no first-class feature for askers to contest closure, and it takes just as many votes to reopen a question as it does to close it (with the same voter reputation requirement))."
}
,
{
"id": "46493355",
"text": "> and technical (there's no first-class feature for askers to contest closure\n\nIt's not quite that bad: when the OP edits the question, there is a checkbox to assert that the edit resolves the reason for closure. Checking it off puts the question in a queue for reconsideration.\n\nHowever, there's the social problem (with possibly a technical solution) that the queue is not as discoverable as it ought to be, and provides no real incentive; the queues generally are useful for curators who work well in a mode of \"let's clean up problems of type X with site content today\", but not for those (like myself) who work well in a mode of e.g. \"let's polish the canonical for problem Y and try to search for and link unrecognized duplicates\".\n\nGiven the imbalance in attention, I agree that reopening a question should have lesser requirements than closing it. But better yet would be if the questions that don't merit reopening, weren't opened in the first place. Then the emphasis could be on getting th"
}
,
{
"id": "46486180",
"text": "> The problem is moderation marking unrelated questions as duplicates.\n\nThe idea was, if there's an answer on the other question that solves your question, your question remains in existence as a signpost pointing to the other one without having to pollute and confuse by having a mixture of similar answers across both with different amounts of votes."
}
,
{
"id": "46488403",
"text": "The disconnect here is that they built it this way, but still call it a question and answer site and give a lot of power over to the person who created the question. They get to mark an answer as the solution for themselves, even if the people coming from Google have another answer as the solution.\n\nIf they were to recreate the site and frame it as a symptom and issue site, which is what the interview described, that would yield many different choices on how to navigate the site, and it would do a lot better. In particular, what happens when two different issues have the same symptom. Right now, that question is closed as a duplicate. Under a symptom and issue site, it's obvious that both should stay as distinct issues."
}
,
{
"id": "46488866",
"text": "Quite often, when my search returned a 'closed as duplicate' reply, I found the allegedly duplicate question did not accurately describe my problem, and the answers to it were often inferior, for my purposes, than those which had been given to my original question before the gate was closed."
}
]
Return ONLY a JSON array with this exact structure (no other text):
[
{
"id": "comment_id_1",
"topics": [
1,
3,
5
]
}
,
{
"id": "comment_id_2",
"topics": [
2
]
}
,
...
]
Rules:
- Each comment can have 0 to 3 topics
- Use 1-based topic indices
- Only assign topics that are genuinely relevant to the comment
- If no topics match, use an empty array:
{
"id": "...",
"topics": []
}
50