[SUGGESTION] System should suggest answers that already exist, before posting. Your thoughts?

Question

To stop people clogging up the system with questions that:

1) Are regularly asked, such as which programming language should I learn first?
2) Have already been asked
3) Also need to automatically reject poorly asked questions

Answer 1

Actually, Tobias, we are cleaning up the Q/A. The forum will be organized automatically BASED on headers and tags. We're preparing it for that. Also, it's [OFF-TOPIC], not [OFF TOPIC]. ;3

hinanawi, a percentage of us can remove posts (gold & platinum) whether they be spam, inappropriate, or if someone accidentally posts something twice.

Trusting a computer to be in charge of removing specific things would be reckless, in my opinion. Not even acknowledging that there are a lot of different human languages, there is also an "interpretation problem" when it comes to trusting a computer with whether or not something should be removed. After firing it up and deploying it, I wouldn't be surprised if SoloLearn's Q/A was blank.

Answer 2

Tobias Hallmans as for spam, i can agree because mods can't actually remove posts iirc, they can just tag them with spam (they really should be able to though), but they do a decent job of telling people that their questions that have already been asked, and direct them to another that has the answer given. (atleast from what i have seen)

Answer 3

I have to agree with Tobias Hallmans. AI won't be as good as human moderators at this stage. AI would reduce obvious spam. The best tools often mix AI at a good threshold (not so high, that false positives occur often). The moderators pick up the issues the AI is unsure of. Both are needed. It doesn't have to be that advanced actually.

I am getting slightly bored of trawling the questions, as the same questions come up all the time, and poorly asked questions are rife.

The moderators on Stack Overflow are too harsh and rude, on here they're too soft on people. Asking poor questions three times in a row, should mean a reduction of XP!

These suggestions would make it better for moderators and ordinary users.

Answer 4

moderators already do this pretty quickly, coding an AI that searches keywords and removes spam would kinda make the moderators redundant