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> Question closure can leave people feeling judged (as we learned Somewhere Else)  
>
> ...counter the impression that duplicates are bad

To solve that problem, one needs to address the source. Somewhere Else would instantly make a conclusion like "aha it's the evil community being rude again" and then come up with some misguided system to counter that. But by applying a slight bit of empathy, we can get to the root source:

The people who cast duplicate close votes Somewhere Else are fed up with endless duplicates. Newbies asking the same question over and over again, with little to no research effort made. Therefore the regulars get tired of that behavior and just close the posts without providing much feedback to the person who asked the question.

There exists a somewhat rare phenomenon though: sometimes when a high quality question that is a dupe gets asked, it is left open long enough for good answers to pop up. And when this happens, this new question might actually turn into the "canonical" target for duplicates. And then the old, present duplicates get closed with the new post as target. It's a very good thing when this happens. The old duplicates of diverse quality are not necessarily the best ones.

But most of the time, new questions that are duplicates just get closed with an old post as target, because that's how the system was designed.

Somewhere Else is suffering from the results of this: there's a lot of old posts with canonical status but so-so quality. Also such posts tend to attract a whole lot of answers over time, where everyone and their mother feels inclined to contribute even though they aren't adding anything new. Or in case they are adding something new, they only add that part and not a complete answer. So over time the canonical post "fragments" into several answers and the result as whole is not very good.

It would be better if these old posts were recompiled into complete answers and one natural way to do that is to close them when something better and more complete shows up. But the duplicate system often doesn't let that happen.

**We shouldn't close posts as duplicates unless there exists a _high quality_ duplicate target. If a question has been asked before, then that alone should not be a reason to close it.**