Can people not really understand this? Some of those related questions are dupes, other times they are paths to rabbit holes. ycombinator does the same thing. When you guys see posts that come up that have been here before, you post links to previous discussions. I saw this recently specifically with the links to articles on Martin Couney (I had a hard time finding that because the article is so poorly worded).
Even Reddit has linkability to detect the URL and show you an 'other discussions' lens (for Old Reddit).
Granted, this is a slight taxonomy difference of 'other discussions' of the same exact topic, vs other discussions related to your topic. But I think it's a useful and helpful feature.
The problem is that there's no continuity between what is related and what is an answer to the question asked. Related answers are intermixed with real answers at the same level. You can only tell something is a real answer by the absence of bold text and presence of light grey text.
The link upthread isn't a good example, because the question is so basic it's easy for them to have a lot of related (duplicate) questions and answers. When the topic requires more nuance or is more specific, then the related questions and answers really aren't related at all, and they just add a bunch of useless noise.
hackere news isn't a question / answer site. I don't come here with the same expectations that I do when I go to something like stack overflow or quora.
Ironically, if I do a google search for something and ycombinator comes up in the results, the link is directly to the comment that is relevant- not to the top level of the article with all of the related sibling comments. If anything, from that perspective hacker news is actually a better question and answer site than quora.
Seems wild to put a bunch of “related” answers that are relationship advice, movie questions and other things when you look up things like programming questions.
I can understand the rabbit hole thing. Never thought about that. That they think of themselves as TikTok and not stack overflow or Reddit.
Even Reddit has linkability to detect the URL and show you an 'other discussions' lens (for Old Reddit).
Granted, this is a slight taxonomy difference of 'other discussions' of the same exact topic, vs other discussions related to your topic. But I think it's a useful and helpful feature.