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About a month ago I asked How frequently should I be posting questions? and received the answer "as often as you need to". Today, in a similar situation, I felt I was answering too many questions.

Too many answers

Now, four of my five interactions in the span of about an hour are answers. Knowing I am allowed to ask questions as often as I need too, I feel I can answer questions as often as I need to, too. Nonetheless, I feel bothered by the frequency of the answers. Would it be appropriate to post on meta

How frequently should I be answering questions?

I did some research and found this meta post which states that two questions that have different scenarios but identical solutions are not duplicates.

That post led me to this meta post which states: "If you ask a question similar to another question and it is likely to get the exact same answer, you have yourself a duplicate question".

I interpreted the newer post to mean:

Different questions with similar answers are not duplicates

And the older post:

Similar questions with similar answers are duplicates.

This seems fair, but leaves ambiguity - where is the line for how similar questions can be?

Using the context "How frequently can I ask questions?" having already been posted, is "How frequently can I answer questions?" similar enough to qualify as a duplicate? What would have to be changed to allow the question be posted if it is not suitable in it's current state?

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  • I'm not super comfortable with the formatting on this post - I feel like it's "word vomit". I spent like fifteen minutes editing it after writing to improve readability. If anybody wants to further improve the formatting feel free to make changes.
    – PausePause
    Sep 10, 2019 at 23:17
  • A lot of these rules are somewhat loosened on the meta site, so if you're trying to understand the main site rules, asking about them in terms of meta questions is potentially confusing. And if you're actually trying to understand meta rules, that's not obvious, at least to me.
    – murgatroid99
    Sep 10, 2019 at 23:41
  • Asking your question would be fine imo, though I would say the answer isn't the same. Ask as often as you need to, answer as often as you want to.
    – Dragonrage Mod
    Sep 10, 2019 at 23:42
  • We don't close questions because their answers are duplicates, but because they are duplicates.
    – Levi C. Olson
    Sep 12, 2019 at 3:19

2 Answers 2

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I'm going to quote myself from my answer here where I covered this subject.

Questions should not be closed as duplicates based on the similarity of the answers. While similarity of answers may be an indicator that the questions may be duplicates, that alone is not justification to close the questions as duplicates. The questions themselves should be examined to see if they are indeed duplicates.

There is also a more recent discussion here on the Arqade on how we want to handle possible duplicates, and the general consensus is, if your question is different than the other question, than it isn't a duplicate even if it might have the same answers. So if you are asking about a fundamentally different thing, or have (a) different (potentially related) issue(s) which may or may not have similar/same answers, then your question is different enough that it can be asked.

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  • So, to summarize - any difference in either the question itself or the answer it generates absolves it from being a duplicate.
    – PausePause
    Sep 11, 2019 at 0:05
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    @PausePause i think it is a bit more granular than that. there is a bit of a gray area when it comes to some questions, but the more experience you get in doing so, the more clear cut it will be. also, duplicate questions arent necessarily bad. if you arent sure about a duplicate, post about it on meta, or drop by chat
    – Dragonrage Mod
    Sep 11, 2019 at 0:12
  • Good clarification, thanks
    – PausePause
    Sep 11, 2019 at 2:27
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Looking at the quote from the older question:

If you ask a question similar to another question and it is likely to get the exact same answer, you have yourself a duplicate question

The important thing is not whether they will probably have the same answer, but whether the questions are so much asking the same thing that you would expect them to have the same answer no matter what the answer is. It's not about whether the questions would just happen to having the same answer, but whether they are asking essentially the same thing, and would therefore necessarily have the same answer.

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