Timeline for People MUST be rewarded with reputation for finding duplicates [duplicate]
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
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72 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Nov 22, 2025 at 20:07 | history | closed |
Karl Knechtel Wai Ha Lee il_raffa β.εηοιτ.βε bad_coder |
Duplicate of It's time to reward the duplicate finders | |
| Nov 18, 2025 at 2:03 | comment | added | Karl Knechtel | Finding and marking dupes on meta serves the same purpose as in the main space. | |
| Nov 17, 2025 at 19:44 | comment | added | Your Common Sense | @KarlKnechtel are you proposing to close this question just following some bureaucratic procedure, or you have reasons to believe that this closure will make this discussion site better? | |
| Nov 17, 2025 at 19:34 | review | Close votes | |||
| Nov 22, 2025 at 20:07 | |||||
| Dec 2, 2022 at 20:15 | history | edited | starballMod | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
I think saying that the request is about rewarding with reputation in the title makes it more clearly descriptive in post listings.
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| Feb 18, 2020 at 22:15 | comment | added | Ian Ringrose | See meta.stackexchange.com/questions/37466/… | |
| Jul 26, 2019 at 23:46 | comment | added | mtraceur | Jesus christ, do you people see some of the stuff that gets closed as duplicates around the various stacks? More and more good questions start with "this isn't a duplicate of [one or more other questions]" defensive disclaimers because they have to. The amount of non-duplicate questions closed because people just do not read or think carefully enough properly judge duplicates might not be that high in absolute terms, but it's way too damn high for us to be incentivizing and empowering people to close what they think are duplicates more. | |
| Jul 23, 2019 at 8:14 | comment | added | NoDataDumpNoContribution | Has there been an official reaction, positive or negative, to this feature request? Where is the feedback usually posted? In an answer? | |
| Jul 23, 2019 at 2:05 | comment | added | Jason C | People always talk about "endless stream of lq questions" but SO just gets an endless stream of questions, period, because it's huge. I'm not convinced the proportion of bad questions relative to total questions is much different than anywhere else. There's just a lot of questions, so necessarily a lot of bad ones. The only thing that would "help" imo is to split the site up into different language sites or something. It's just ... big. | |
| Jul 22, 2019 at 22:52 | answer | added | Frank | timeline score: -3 | |
| Jul 22, 2019 at 19:35 | comment | added | DRP | Personally I believe that one of the main root reasons for duplicates is due to "question wording" which causes and old existing question to stay away from the inquirers radar, whether it is lack of technical words or other. If somehow we could get a type of metadata like tags but in a broader sense, like having a question rephrased many different ways, then when a user does a look up with whatever knowledge they have available to raise the concern, this would pop-up. Finding duplicates would be replaced in someway with adding many tag rephasings of the same Q. | |
| Jul 21, 2019 at 17:59 | comment | added | coldspeed95 | How about badges instead of rep? | |
| Jul 21, 2019 at 17:39 | comment | added | Amir Almusawi | I've been coming to this site since I learned that computers got "programmed". I've never asked a question, because any question I've ever had has already been answered...multiple times. With countless developers here that are better qualified than me, how could I ever participate if it weren't for answering poorly formed questions that have been asked 1000 times? I agree that it's not good for the site, and you have my upvote. But what are the alternatives outside of being sidelined indefinitely? | |
| Jul 21, 2019 at 4:13 | history | edited | iBug | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Jul 21, 2019 at 0:05 | comment | added | user541686 | @pppery: Yeah, as a matter of fact, I do. Been on the network for 8 years. It's nothing in comparison. | |
| Jul 20, 2019 at 23:54 | comment | added | Perry | Do you realize how frustrating it is, as a user who cares strongly about the quality of old questions, to encounter hundreds of old unclosed duplicates? | |
| Jul 20, 2019 at 23:52 | comment | added | user541686 | Do you realize how f#@!ing frustrating it is for people when people insist a question is a duplicate when it is not? This will only incentivize that to happen more. | |
| Jul 20, 2019 at 23:35 | comment | added | Perry | The problem is that SO's close vote review queue is defunct. Rewarding users for finding duplicates will serve to overwhelm the close vote review queue even more. Furthermore, this problem is not SO specific (I flagged >300 years-old questions as duplicate, including at least one question that was asked in 2011, in the course of 2 weeks over at Arqade, so should be posted to MSE instead of MSO. | |
| Jul 20, 2019 at 23:20 | comment | added | user4639281 | I see questions closed as duplicates all the time that just blatantly aren't duplicates because the gold badge holder doesn't want to answer another question on the given topic or because of some misguided idea that content can somehow become deprecated even though it is possible to use older versions of software where the problem still exists and the "deprecated" solution to the problem is the only solution available to those users. We should definitely not be offering more incentive for users to do so. | |
| Jul 20, 2019 at 17:34 | comment | added | mason | @Martin Should s not just imagination. That is the procedure for how this site operates. If a question is a duplicate, any answers go on the duplicate target. | |
| Jul 20, 2019 at 13:32 | answer | added | NelsonGon | timeline score: -4 | |
| Jul 20, 2019 at 13:28 | comment | added | S.S. Anne | @Martin Perhaps the comment should've been "SO is never going to do this." | |
| Jul 20, 2019 at 13:27 | comment | added | Mm-Art-In | @JL2210 that makes no sense. Visitor counts and numbers of questions asked have nearly no correlation. | |
| Jul 20, 2019 at 13:26 | comment | added | Mm-Art-In | @mason - "should" is not what always happens. "should" is just a flair of imagination | |
| Jul 20, 2019 at 13:20 | comment | added | S.S. Anne | SO is never going to do this. Their revenue is coming from users writing bad questions like this (and having people write bad answers to them). It causes more traffic on the network, which translates to more ad money and more people buying their services. Rewarding people for finding duplicates will cause these questions to be closed and deleted more (which will cause some users to ask and answer less, as a pose to their question being answered). | |
| Jul 20, 2019 at 13:11 | comment | added | mason | @Martin Then they should close as a duplicate, and add their up to date answer to the dupe target. | |
| Jul 20, 2019 at 13:04 | comment | added | Mm-Art-In | If a question is marked as a duplicate at any point in its life, then any "correct" answer should loose the +15 that it gets for being marked as correct, while retaining any +10 for up votes for being a good answer. Many dupe questions have valuable answers which add extra (more up to date) details that are not present in the original question (that's been duped) | |
| Jul 20, 2019 at 3:14 | comment | added | jww | You are wishing for unicorns. The current team at Stack Overflow is almost completely incompetent. They cannot identify and fix problems. We need to get rid of the current leadership to have a hope of getting things fixed. | |
| Jul 19, 2019 at 23:29 | comment | added | President James K. Polk | "...Otherwise this site will continue to be the endless stream of extremely low quality content..." How does quickly closing dupes reduce this endless stream in any way? | |
| Jul 19, 2019 at 23:18 | comment | added | John Conde | @Zoe I had two high rep users reopen questions that were closed as dupes just so they could answer them. :/ The answers didn't offer anything that wasn't in the canonical question already. The internet points offered by gamification is just too difficult to pass up. I like the goal of this question, but I don't think it will come close to solving the problem. | |
| Jul 19, 2019 at 19:07 | answer | added | weegee | timeline score: -5 | |
| Jul 19, 2019 at 17:21 | comment | added | Peter Mortensen |
Re "type site:stackoverflow.com manually: In Firefox, you can define a shortcut by bookmarking the URL https://duckduckgo.com/html/?q=site%3Astackoverflow.com+%s and setting "Keyword" to "s" ("s" is not related to the substitution %s). Then using s PHP SQL injection in the addressbar will expand the URL such that "site:stackoverflow.com PHP SQL injection" is used in the search engine. So it is "Ctrl + T", "s", and space (four key presses) followed by the search string. The same kind of shortcuts can be set up for Wiktionary, Wikipedia, dictionaries, etc.
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| Jul 19, 2019 at 17:06 | history | edited | Peter Mortensen | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
Active reading [<https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/single-handedly#Adverb> <https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/off-topic> <https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ready-made#Adjective>].
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| Jul 18, 2019 at 22:29 | answer | added | CertainPerformance | timeline score: 28 | |
| Jul 18, 2019 at 22:11 | comment | added | Georgy | I don't care if I get rewarded with rep-points for duplicate finding or no, instead I would prefer to have more moderation tools available after having raised some number of flags. It's kinda sad to see rephunters earning dupehammers in no time, and I'm not even able to cast a close vote even though I raised more than 5000 flags. | |
| Jul 18, 2019 at 17:06 | comment | added | Alexei Levenkov | While I'm interested in topic in general <non welcoming text>this is really low quality post - exact duplicate of multiple discussions on "reward searching duplicate" topic, does not have any concrete proposal, does not explain how already discussed problems should be solved, does not even list known issues... </non welcoming text>. Positive thing is new set of people have chance to rehash the same concerns discussed earlier... | |
| Jul 18, 2019 at 16:11 | answer | added | vaer-k | timeline score: -26 | |
| Jul 18, 2019 at 15:20 | answer | added | user400654 | timeline score: 15 | |
| Jul 18, 2019 at 14:19 | comment | added | Scott Hannen | We reward answers with reputation based on votes. We don't award reputation for answering. We award it for answers that others agree with. If we were to award reputation for identifying duplicates, at a minimum it should only apply when those potential duplicates have been somehow validated. Duplicates marked by hammers are often wrong. So very, very, off-the-rails. what-are-you-thinking wrong. We shouldn't award reputation for unilaterally marking a duplicate any more than for just answering a question. There must be careful review and validation, even more than now. | |
| Jul 18, 2019 at 14:18 | answer | added | user50049 | timeline score: -9 | |
| Jul 18, 2019 at 13:13 | history | reopened |
user1114 Temani Afif Script47 Clive Stephen RauchMod |
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| Jul 18, 2019 at 13:00 | review | Reopen votes | |||
| Jul 18, 2019 at 13:13 | |||||
| Jul 18, 2019 at 12:26 | history | closed |
NoDataDumpNoContribution Suma HaveNoDisplayName Robert Longson Code Lღver |
Duplicate of Should duplicate finding give reputation? [duplicate] | |
| Jul 18, 2019 at 11:19 | answer | added | Suma | timeline score: 43 | |
| Jul 18, 2019 at 11:15 | review | Close votes | |||
| Jul 18, 2019 at 12:26 | |||||
| Jul 18, 2019 at 10:44 | answer | added | NoDataDumpNoContribution | timeline score: 80 | |
| Jul 18, 2019 at 10:32 | history | edited | Suraj Rao |
edited tags
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| Jul 18, 2019 at 10:14 | comment | added | Jonas Wilms | @shmee I'd rather say finding should he awarded, because that is the work done. Dupe hammering can be done in seconds, and there are enough gold badgers around that could ... (at least under the js tag) | |
| Jul 18, 2019 at 10:03 | comment | added | Zoe - Save the data dump | @YourCommonSense there's potentially users with as little as 3k rep with dupe hammers. Realistically, because question quality has dropped significantly, I'd guesstimate the earliest occurences are around 10000 rep (at least based on the Android tag badge holders). By excluding hammers, you're excluding more users than you might expect. And with 42% close vote invalidation, excluding hammers may have a bigger impact than you'd expect. | |
| Jul 18, 2019 at 9:58 | comment | added | Jeanne Dark | Related: Reward for close voters finding appropriate duplicates? | |
| Jul 18, 2019 at 9:50 | comment | added | shmee | Reward for finding duplicates or for having a question closed as a dupe that someone has found? Only the latter would make sense, but the reward seems rather irrelevant, based on my personal experience with ~50% of all dupe flags simply ageing away .. | |
| Jul 18, 2019 at 9:49 | comment | added | Magisch | I think this would be a great idea if done well, but I also think it will never, ever ever be implemented or even considered. Good luck. | |
| Jul 18, 2019 at 9:47 | comment | added | Your Common Sense | @Zoe to make it clear: I don't give a damn if some reputation billionaire won't be closing duplicates. I only care for knowledgeable and conscientious newcomers who don't have a chance to get reputation points in the situation when most questions already has answers. | |
| Jul 18, 2019 at 9:43 | comment | added | Zoe - Save the data dump | My point is, as much as I would love to see a system like this, there are a lot more details that need to be worked out before it's "safe" to put into production without risking abuse. Temani Afif proposed a decent system (at least after the clarification) that could work as a compromise. That being said, adding rewards for duplicate closure would go a long way towards avoiding scattered answers, or at least attempting to repair the damage already done. There's a lot of things that can be abused, and it can happen regardless of how high rep someone has, or how unlikely it may seem. | |
| Jul 18, 2019 at 9:22 | comment | added | yivi | There are less than 10 users with that much rep, @Zoe. If we exclude Jon Skeet and a SE employee, only 6 users. Now it's only a matter of counting hammers. Which is a phrase I didn't expect to use today. --- Too easy, I shouldn't have started from the bottom. | |
| Jul 18, 2019 at 9:15 | comment | added | Zoe - Save the data dump | @YourCommonSense I've seen users with hundreds of thousands of reputation with multiple hammers who post answers to duplicates so low-quality it's almost worth nuking off the site instantly. One of those actually has over 800k reputation, and 22 hammers. | |
| Jul 18, 2019 at 9:14 | comment | added | Temani Afif | @Zoe I know but we can at least prevent the reputation gain in the future from those posts. As an active gold hammer I see a lot of answers massively upvoted after the closure. It's like a way to block the reputation from increasing, not really to prevent any gain of reputation. | |
| Jul 18, 2019 at 9:11 | comment | added | Your Common Sense | @Zoe gold badge holders are generally not that greedy for the gamification points. | |
| Jul 18, 2019 at 9:10 | comment | added | Zoe - Save the data dump | @YourCommonSense then where's the incentive for gold tag badge holders to close instead of answer? | |
| Jul 18, 2019 at 9:08 | comment | added | Zoe - Save the data dump | @TemaniAfif the problem is that high-rep users with hammers some times answers the trivial duplicates, meaning they can do it long before the question is closed. With invalidation rates and slow review, most of the votes will be cast before the closure, defeating the purpose. | |
| Jul 18, 2019 at 9:08 | comment | added | Your Common Sense | @Zoe surely there must be no gain if you already have enough rep to close a dupe single-handedly. | |
| Jul 18, 2019 at 9:07 | comment | added | Zoe - Save the data dump | For any given feature that provides rep, there's a potential to abuse it. A high-rep user could also go on an incorrect duplicate closure spree to gain rep, or as already mentioned, use socks to get more rep. If a feature like this is implemented, there needs to be a system in place to avoid abuse as well, especially close-spree abuse. Sockpuppet abuse doesn't do too much damage in comparison | |
| Jul 18, 2019 at 9:04 | comment | added | xdtTransform | Imagine if those dupe answerer, go to profile and start linking each of their dupe answers, to an other dupe answer. From gaining rep by answering you also had an other layer, dupe link to your own dupe refining the rep farm with a +2 | |
| Jul 18, 2019 at 8:50 | history | edited | Your Common Sense | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
added 556 characters in body
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| Jul 18, 2019 at 8:31 | comment | added | Temani Afif | @Script47 I would keep the rep and make it exactly like you switch the post to wiki (only the new votes will not count). I consider the cases of non trivial duplicate that get closed later so people who already answered and don't know the duplicate will logically get rewarded. | |
| Jul 18, 2019 at 8:28 | comment | added | Script47 | @TemaniAfif would retrospectively remove rep or would you keep the rep that is earned until it's closed? | |
| Jul 18, 2019 at 8:28 | comment | added | Your Common Sense | @TemaniAfif this is my life's dream. But it will spoil the "gamification", and will never be implemented. So the only feature that possibly could be accepted is not one that strips a person of the hard gained precious points but one that awards them. | |
| Jul 18, 2019 at 8:26 | comment | added | Temani Afif | or probably we disable the reputation of answers in case the question is closed as duplicate. So the question/answers behave like wiki posts. Doing so you will earn nothing answering trivial duplicate (you will probably gain some reputation only if you get upvoted/accepted before the closure) | |
| Jul 18, 2019 at 8:25 | comment | added | Tensibai | How much should the closer gain ? My main concern about it is that I don't think it will really help with the "hasty answers" as they'll still go for the +15 of accepted answer. The idea is pleasant but I'm not convinced it would really help, may worth a try anyway with proper stats to back it up and maybe a rep recalc at the end if it's not kept ? | |
| Jul 18, 2019 at 8:23 | comment | added | Your Common Sense | Yes, yes you can. Stack overflow staff is paranoid about people who would possbily amass enormous reputation value by some sort of fraud. The problem is, such a fortune cannot be converted into anything useful. So may be it is not that dangerous as it feared. | |
| Jul 18, 2019 at 8:20 | comment | added | Script47 | @JeanneDark and you can do the same with answering if you really wanted (meaning, socketpuppets). The positives of this outweigh the negatives. BTW, if anyone is going to use socketpuppets, chances are they'd do it for answers because the rep amount you gain is a lot more. You could have the dupe reward be the same as an edit (+2) if you were really concerned. | |
| Jul 18, 2019 at 8:10 | history | asked | Your Common Sense | CC BY-SA 4.0 |