Question

I've been noticing an increase in questions asked two or more times by the same person. How can we improve this?

When I see a few hours, I assume the questioner got impatient.
But sometimes I see only a minute or two. My guess is that there is a delay between posting an answer and seeing it on Socratic. This would lead some students to think their question didn't get posted. Can we fix this?

Answer 1

Well...

Explanation:

... the number of people asking the same question more than one has not really been increasing, it's just that you happen to spot more duplicate questions at times before I get the chance to delete/merge them.

I delete anywhere between 5 and 10 duplicates every day, so I'd say that this issue has come to be an everyday thing.

Now, we can't really do anything about that because in most cases, that's a technique students use to increase the chances of getting answers.

Oftentimes students will post the same question multiple times in quick succession--I've seen as many as 12 identical questions posted in under 3 minutes--so it's not really a problem of a delay between when they post the question and actually see it posted.

In other cases, they will post the same question again hours or even days later.

We could try to block users from posting the same question more than once, and I'm sure that will discourage some from using this technique, but the block would be pretty easy to bypass by creating a different account or changing the wording of the question ever so slightly, for example.

Anyway, this issue is on the team's list, so chances are that they will work on a fix at some point in the future, maybe sooner rather than later if the number of instances where users post the same question multiple times increases significantly.