I was just given this audit. Oddly enough, I recognized the question. I am surprised, however, that I was not one of the original close votes.

Hi All! Just checking out this place (to bookmark it).

1, 2, 3

@AsafKaragila You are not imagining this. Some users, gasp, care more about their reputation and ignore their Reputation entirely. To their credit, the user in question is very active in reviewing (lest we forget). But, a bad Reputation colors the way I look at their reviewing, and makes me see it as self-serving (\approx answer a trivial question if you can be the first, and vote to close otherwise). They can be educated, but...

OTOH, if someone has a PhD and sees someone else only capable of freshman calculus rake in 50k easily, I sort of see the desire to get to 100k ASAP. Sigh. Ignoring the Reputation...

Sigh.

@JyrkiLahtonen How do you distinguish between "reputation" and "Reputation"? I imagine one of them must be "what people think of you" and the other must refer to the numeric MSE participation score, but it's not clear to me which one of these a capital R should indicate.

What do you think @HenningMakholm? I have very little understanding for a user who thinks explaining the set difference $\emtpyset\setminus\emptyset$ adds something of value to the site. Let alone one who doesn't bother to check whether a related explanation has already been given.

Just pointing out that your terminology for the distinction you're making is not very self-explanatory. I can sort of puzzle out what you must mean by matching it up to what I already know you think about these things, but ...

Also, though, to be hones I have a bit of difficulty understanding Asaf's annoyance about duplicate questions. As I see it, the duplicate mechanism is there to help us -- if it's quicker to give an asker what they need by pointing to already-written answers than it is to write an answer from scratch, then everybody wins. However, if someone can more easily answer the question than they can search for a previous question, and they do so, then where's the harm?

All I can imagine is worrying about such an answer leading to "undeserved rep", but that's really putting too much weight on imaginary internet points, I think.

Completely differently, I think $\emptyset\setminus\emptyset=\emptyset$ can be a confusing question for students and it is good to have explanation somewhere. (Although probably there is stuff with empty set which is more confusing. Such as functions from/to $\emptyset$, vacuously true statements etc. There even briefly existed nullology tag.)

Checking whether or not the question already exists is a separate issue, relatively experienced users should probably know that this should be done and they should be able to recognize questions that are very likely already on the site, since they are frequently asked and very natural questions in some introductory course.

BTW I remember that Jyrki has mentioned that he misses ability to edit comments after grace period. Clearly, it is the same in chat. :-) (Although I am pretty sure there is plenty of stuff you do not miss to outweight this.)

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@amWhy That's annoying. @DanielFischer: I flagged it for moderator attention explaining why I thought it should be closed (even the bounty period was already up), and my flag was deemed helpful but it's still not closed. Any reason?

@HenningMakholm Then we just disagree. I think that the increase in site entropy of having (near) duplicates scattered all over the place outweighs any gain of satisfying a single user three minutes faster. One or three near duplicates is not a serious problem, yet, but when we get to the hundredth variant... I will continue to throw whatever weight I still have to make the site less rewarding for dupe answerers. Also, dupe answering promotes the culture of instant gratification.

@user21820 Sorry, not my table. Maybe the handling mod thought it should be closed without diamond-involvement, maybe they thought the question wasn't that bad, I don't know. (it's closed now, so meh.)

Oh okay.

@JyrkiLahtonen It's not about helping someone "three minutes faster"; it's about helping the user with less work for the responder. If it's less work to jot down an answer than it is to search for a duplicate and pore through the search results to find one that is indeed a duplicate, then why not optimize for the lowest work?

IOW, how does your "increase in site entropy" translate to any humans actually being inconvenienced?

@JyrkiLahtonen Hey now that you're not a moderator, would you be helping us here? (Though I suppose you want to take a break from all the dirt.) =)

@user21820 @amWhy @Did @XanderHenderson: Open for deletion now. The author just made it even worse. Just for kicks, let's use the author's argument against himself: If 3+2 is not equal to 7−2, just because I wrote two different expressions in the first part of this sentence, then we can never say that x is equal to y either, because l👀k those two letters are different!

@user21820 I don't have enough XPs to delete answers. I did flag it earlier, however.

Yes I forgot.

@user21820 The first answer has been deleted (since June 17). The second answer needs one more delete vote.

@amWhy Yea thanks! And hello!

@user21820 Hello! (I was out of town Friday-Monday, so you probably didn't see much of me, though I still checked in at CRUDE once a day to do some closing/deleting.)

@amWhy Ah; I was rather busy this whole week, and will be in the next few weeks too. =)

@HenningMakholm Capital R "Reputation" is the most important of the two forms of reputation; little teeny-tiny r "reputation" is one's quantitative score, which is not impressive and rather meaningless without high Reputation as well.

"reputation" = XPs :)

GOTTA GET THEM ALL!

How else are you going to beat the Omega Weapon?

For those who can vote to delete a recent question, this question is a bare PSQ with no effort from the asker

PSQ/no effort

Note: forgive me on my last two links; I meant to link to the respective questions, but somehow managed to link to an answer, in each comment.

Another PSQ with no effort

Open for deletion

oi... the comments on the first one are priceless

@XanderHenderson :)

Bare PSQ with four answers from folks that did it for the OP

@JyrkiLahtonen That matches my comments about "two kinds of reputation on this site"... which very much corresponds to what you refer to as "reputation" vs. "Reputation". (Though sometimes one can earn both).

@HenningMakholm IOW, how does your "increase in site entropy" translate to any humans actually being inconvenienced? Increasing entropy will make it progressively more difficult to find the actually useful stuff.

So the spawning of useless duplicates makes it more difficult to use the site as a repository of knowledge. Inconveniencing anyone who uses the site for such purposes. Frankly, I don't give a damn, if we inconvenience homework help seekers. Au contraire.

Um, where do "homework help seekers" fit in here? The questions that are duplicates are rarely homework; homework is generally too specific to match an earlier question. And the ones being inconvenienced by a demand to spend extra time on marking a question as a duplicate are not "homework help seekers", but answerers.

@HenningMakholm I don't know what questions/answers started this conversation; but in general, homework help seekers ask a great number of questions which have already been answered. In this way, any one who strives for Reputation takes time to search for dupes (and there are likely many), rather than answering immediately, to gain rep. If the question/answer to which you refer is different, it doesn't negate the fact that duplicates are comprised of primarily repeated dupes.

...oops, my last clause should read: "... it doesn't negate the fact that the majority of "do my homework" posts have already been asked and answered." And of course, that is what I've come to know about this site, and may not speak for all.

Hey, @Xander. How goes it?

@amWhy I'm still on the right side of the dirt. :)

@XanderHenderson Never doubted that! :)

Yay!

And you? How's it hangin'?

PSQ: I want... I want

@XanderHenderson A bit frustrated with the crap posted today (questions AND answers). But... I keep trudging through the muck. :)

...Also waiting 25 minutes until votes are replenished!

Heh.

Yeah, I am very close to running out of votes, which does not often happen.

And it is weird, too, since most students should be off right now, no?

@XanderHenderson Yes, perhaps, but it might be the case that students who failed their class in fall or spring are trying to retake it during summer?

Hrm. I suppose that could be the case.

In other news, I need to get back to preparing notes for next week, when I have to start teaching one of the worst designed classes I've ever come across.

Yay business calc. :(

@XanderHenderson I empathize with you!