It's often not a good idea to have the die-hards do the moderation.

You'll end up a stack overflow situation haha

SO has strict moderation. That's a very different scenario.

I've moderated forums and tend to generally agree with SO's approach. Not sure I'd leave it to users; we had dedicated moderators do everything. I've seen loosely or unmoderated programming forums, and it quickly goes to shit.

Handing moderation over to fans is a different issue. It leads to strict and horribly biased moderation.

You guys realize that if SO community/mods weren't like they are, then you'd end up with tons of garbage in search results?

This reminds me of Wikipedia. The hardcore contributors/maintainers cop a whole lot of criticism, and I'm sure some of it is justified (though some is clearly just nerd-shaming), but people rarely acknowledge how amazing it is that the project is basically a success, and how quickly it could degenerate if the most dedicated 'loosened up' or lost interest.

That's an interesting opinion. My impression is that the overwhelming majority of good content on SO is grandfathered from when moderation was much less strict.

That's up to the point that finding good answers to problems with new software is hard nowadays.

I find the majority of SO questions in search results have been wrongly closed as duplicates

Yep, I generally remove SO from my searches because of how many useless closed as duplicates questions find their way into search results.

If they want to moderate like that fine, just delete the dupe questions.

Dupes have their uses - they do a pretty good job of ensuring a wider variety of Google searches lead to the answer. Basically, a built in “this paragraph is a synonym for this other one”.

That’s really not been my experience. I find the non duplicate question is normally somewhat related but not actually useful, being subtly different or quite old etc.

That said while SO has been effectively useless to me for years, if you find it’s helpful then more power to you.

The most useful answers I find on SO tend to be marked "closed; off-topic." Thank goodness for the off-topics and the dupes.

It won't scale.