My extensive experience has been that the overwhelming majority of the time that people complain "this isn't a duplicate", it actually quite obviously is. (And there were even more irritating complaints on the meta site at times; all the way up to the level of "you shouldn't ever close duplicates at all because I think you shouldn't", demonstrating no interest in even trying to understand the reasons for doing so.) Of course, people do make mistakes; there was an entire process for fixing this, but most people could not be bothered to engage with it productively (or even civilly). But feel free to give examples of things that you feel were wrongly closed from your own experience.
[–] kstrauser 1 day ago
[–] zahlman 8 hours ago
Yes, it is. Especially considering that I too was mainly "trawling the new Python questions" for similar reasons, and being dismayed at how many dupes there were and how hard it was to find an actually good version of that question to use as the duplicate target for something that was constantly asked.
> I saw this constantly, so frequently that I'd be hard pressed to answer with specifics.
Without specifics I really can't engage with that, sorry. I would encourage you to check out the [reopen-closed] tag on the meta site, in chronological order (or take a random sample) and see what kinds of things people think should be reopened and how off-base they are (and also see how it is explained that things are in fact duplicates).
As it happens, I have a single "saved" (site bookmarking feature) question on the meta site with that tag, saved because I wrote what I think is a useful reference answer to the general question of why duplicates get closed so quickly: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/422581
> often because the original answer was ancient and obsolete
This does not make a question "not a duplicate". The fact that there are different ways to solve the problem now, doesn't make it not the same problem. It is, instead, a reason to write a new answer, but we still want all the high-quality answers in the same place.
From time to time, a new "canonical" gets chosen for FAQs, because the community recognizes that it's better quality. "Up-to-date" is one consideration in that equation. But a lot of the time, people argue that an old Q&A should be disregarded or replaced simply because it is old, and this is often just not true. For example, the question 'What does if __name__ == "__main__": do?' (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/419163) was posted in 2009; as it turns out, it still does the same thing in Python 3.15 and the reasons for using (or not using) it are the same as well.
[–] kstrauser 8 hours ago
No amount of “you’re holding it wrong” could convince me that the millions of people who wanted to use it the way it was broadly described were truly doing it wrong. The payoff for slavishly doing things the “right” moderator-approved way just wasn’t worth the effort.
[–] giancarlostoro 14 hours ago
[–] zahlman 8 hours ago
Generally, the people doing this are familiar with the material. Fast closures are motivated by an unconscious "ugh, not THIS question again". And the kinds of things that get asked over and over usually don't change very much.
There's a particular type of question asker who likes to say "what's the way to do this in [current year]?" as if to imply that it should be something different from before. But it very often isn't. And indeed, developers complain when languages/libraries/ecosystems change too quickly, which makes language designers/library authors more conservative about those changes.
[–] braiamp 12 hours ago
The top answer is still up to date
[–] giancarlostoro 11 hours ago
[–] braiamp 6 hours ago
[–] pdw 22 hours ago
[–] giancarlostoro 15 hours ago
Fair, I got my wording wrong, its been a while since I've landed on the site... Sadly, I used to love reading SO for fun and to learn random tidbits.
I've run into way too many "this is a duplicate of" and its referencing something from 2003 in 2025 where the runtime has changed, and a similar looking issue was confused for the actual issue, the resolution in the linked "duplicate" doesn't apply or work. In my opinion, if you're going to call something a duplicate, prove that the solution there works before you lock it down.
Q: How do Python's dict preserve insertion order?
A: [duplicate of "Why does a Python dict's keys have a different ordering each run?"]
It was clear that the mod/curator/whatever spent no time attempting to understand what was actually being asked, and linked it to something that was completely incorrect as an answer to the real question.
I saw this constantly, so frequently that I'd be hard pressed to answer with specifics. If you asked me "when did you last eat a fruit bat", I can tell you the month and year because that stood out. If you asked me "when did you last eat spaghetti", I'd have a hard time saying.