I'm relatively new to SE in general, so I may be missing something here, but recently I've been seeing a lot of people apparently getting angry that their questions are marked duplicate. Can someone explain to me what the reasoning is behind this being considered an insult? I haven't come up with anything.
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1$\begingroup$ Partially and historically, because one of the founders said that closing is a step on the way to deletion (paraphrased) - Stack Overflow podcast episode 54 (the original series), 26 min 17 secs - 26 min 35 secs. Especially if taken out of context. $\endgroup$– Peter MortensenCommented Jun 23, 2017 at 16:34
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$\begingroup$ -1. I think this question is not useful. How will it benefit the community to have it answered? Also, answers are likely to be primarily opinion-based. You have not cited any examples, but the only people who can provide factual answers are those who got angry. Anybody else is only making a guess. $\endgroup$– sammy gerbilCommented Jun 25, 2017 at 20:18
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$\begingroup$ Several times, I've seen questions closed as duplicates of other questions to which they were only superficially similar, which suggests that the voters-to-close did not read the question very carefully before voting. I think it's quite clear why this would make a person angry, especially if that person put some time into formulating a thoughtful question. On the other hand, this pretty clearly does not apply to the example(s) I suspect you currently have in mind. $\endgroup$– WillOCommented Aug 31, 2018 at 3:01
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$\begingroup$ Followup to my last comment: I see now that this was posted over a year ago, so I retract my presumption that you were talking about some recent examples. $\endgroup$– WillOCommented Aug 31, 2018 at 3:03
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2 Answers
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My guess is that some users may have seen the purported duplicate whilst writing their question. Then they read through the duplicate, but although they may accept that is very closely related to their question, they don't understand the answers given.
So they hope by asking a slight variation of the question that they may get a wider range of answers, one of which will explain the solution in a way they can understand, compared to the existing answers that accompany the duplicate.
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- It looks very similar as the closure with a different reason.
- Question closed as dupe means that it is a dupe in the view of the VtC voters. It may be not a dupe in the view of the OP.
On these reasons, I typically check if a question deserves also an up.
On larger sites, with many golden tag badge holders, it can be a problem if they don't use their decisive vote very wisely.
