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After a post was declared a "duplicate" it is effectively killed, wasting the time of the original poster, if one uses only the initial link, which is being tacitly redirected.

He is not made aware of this in the popup-windows or in my case by the "admins" or whomever. I ask to reopen my original post, "fix dreaded "A stop job is running" cylon-animation garbling systemd.debug_shell on Alt-F9", which is now redirected to a related post about the issue but with different solutions.

This is unfair treatment of the original posters. Quite offending actually. What is the point of actually suppressing additional solutions in this non-transparent way? Maybe it is the "closing" [as duplicate]... No one understands how this site really works.

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    What is the solution that was suppressed? You posted a novel solution to the question linked to from your duplicate question. That answer is not "suppressed" in any way. In fact, had it been an answer to your original duplicated question, less people might have the chance to see it. Now there are actually (at least) two venues for users to find your answer. By reopening your post, there will be two separate questions with two separate sets of answers. Visitors to your question would not immediately find the other set of answers and vice versa.
    – Kusalananda on strike Mod
    Dec 10, 2019 at 18:29

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
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For what it's worth, I can see why you're frustrated about this. Now I notice how the site behaved, I am really weirded out by it. But I don't think that means we should undo this specific duplicate. It is a good fit for the rest of the duplicate features.

The people who write the site features don't necessarily read questions here, on Unix & Linux Meta. On the overall StackExchange Meta, there are some very old questions:

If you want to mint a link to your post, you can add ?noredirect=1 to the end. Compare:

(In case someone doesn't know what the problem is, try logging out first. Then you will see the difference :-).

In the page you are redirected to, there is a column on the right hand side. You can scroll down to the heading Linked. You can see your question linked there, using a ?noredirect=1 link. That might be useful if you're struggling to find your way back to a "duplicate" question.

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  • try logging out first – Wow. I have never ever noticed this is how it works. Not even when my reputation was not high enough (or on sites where it's not high enough). I admit I originally voted the question down, but now I understand the OP and I've just changed my vote. Lesson learned. – Now I notice how the site behaved, I am really weirded out by it – Same here.
    – Kamil Maciorowski
    Dec 10, 2019 at 14:58
  • Why is this weird? The whole idea of closing as a dupe is because the question has been asked and the answers can be found on the dupe. So automatically redirecting users to the dupe seems like the best way of helping them find an answer. Why send them to the closed one where they'd need to click on the dupe link before finding their answer?
    – terdon on strike Mod
    Dec 12, 2019 at 9:25
  • @terdon Stephen Kitt was also confused about this in Chat. Your comment is incomplete: I'm a (logged-in) user, and I'm not automatically redirected. I don't propose any weird workaround for the U&L site, just to acknowledge it and extend some sympathy in individual cases. The sentence you pick up on is a personal opinion; that has some relevance to the asker because they have specifically complained about my involvement. Otherwise it's more on-topic for Meta.SE. But e.g. I'm weirded out if I use the "share link" feature on that question, even now, it silently redirects me to the other one.
    – sourcejedi
    Dec 12, 2019 at 11:26
  • @sourcejedi yes, but isn't that a good thing? Why should it send you to a closed duplicate instead of the place where you can find your answer? If you're logged in, you presumably know something about the site and can find your way to the dupe. But for people coming in from search engines, sending them to the closed one would be a waste of time. Hence the redirect
    – terdon on strike Mod
    Dec 12, 2019 at 11:30
  • @terdon as discussed in chat, it's a tradeoff (IIRC, the words "conflict of interest" were used). You haven't answered my second sentence; it actually tends to send me to a closed duplicate, because I'm logged in (and because I have some privilege set in my profile, at least according to some comments). This makes your question rather unclear :-).
    – sourcejedi
    Dec 12, 2019 at 11:36
  • @sourcejedi sorry, but I don't understand. What second sentence? As I said before, if you are logged in, you are sent to the original. If you are not, for example if you are coming from a search engine, then you are sent to the dupe target. This all seems like a very good idea to me. What would be the point of sending users to the dupe instead of the target?
    – terdon on strike Mod
    Dec 12, 2019 at 11:38
  • @terdon Are you saying logged in users don't use search engines?
    – sourcejedi
    Dec 12, 2019 at 11:39
  • What? No, of course not. I am saying that the vast majority of visitors to the site are not logged in and have simply run a search on a search engine. Those visitors are then immediately redirected to the dupe target. So they find their answer directly. Logged in users, whether they come from search engines or not, are assumed to know the system a bit better and understand what duplicates are, so are shown the original. This all seems like a very, very good and intelligent compromise to me. I don't see why it's a problem.
    – terdon on strike Mod
    Dec 12, 2019 at 11:41
  • @terdon Sorry. [My last comment or so was out of bounds, I don't mind if you scrap it.] You're clearly inviting me to expand my answer, but I wasn't motivated to write a formal argument. I don't see it as a big policy dilemma for U&L, and I'm not inspired to write a "bug report" for Meta.SE.
    – sourcejedi
    Dec 12, 2019 at 13:10
  • @sourcejedi fair enough. I was just trying to understand why this would be a bad thing.
    – terdon on strike Mod
    Dec 12, 2019 at 13:18
  • @terdon In open source software, I see various places where clever compromises are used or could be used. Sometimes that's "too clever for your own good". Complexity, surprise, breaking models in a user's mind or architectural models, they make a tradeoff. I'd love to see arguments for or against this website behaviour being compliant with Roy Fielding's REST :-). (Whether I understand them or not. The "semantic web" people go a level of abstraction beyond my comprehension).
    – sourcejedi
    Dec 12, 2019 at 13:37

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