> Every single time their reason was "duplication", it was not AT ALL a duplicate. Two different questions (sometimes obviously very different) with two different answers.
Please feel free to show concrete examples, and I'd be happy to try to explain the reasoning.
Say I ask "How to do X in settings.gradle?" and it is closed as a duplicate to "How to do X in build.gradle?". I know how to do X in build.gradle, I know it is not the same as doing X in settings.gradle (even if it's is twice the same X), and I know how to do X in settings.gradle (because I just had a need and found a solution without the help of StackOverflow). So I post an answer right away.
Can you explain the reasoning, or do you need it more concrete because you're absolutely sure you know better?
Because what's clear to me is that those (because it required multiple votes) who closed it as duplicate have no clue how it works. They obviously stopped at "X == X, it's a duplicate".
At some point I got into the habit of adding notes like "Note: it is not a duplicate of A because [...] and it is not a duplicate of B because [...]", which honestly made the question worse for those who actually understand it (just for the sake of pleasing those who would close it as duplicate). Spoiler: they closed it as a duplicate of A.
But stay happy in your world where you know everything, I'm not coming back anyway.
To "show a concrete example" I would need a question ID. (As I've explained in other posts, deletion is probably not a problem; deletion on Stack Overflow is normally "soft", and I have the reputation needed to see those posts.)
I'm not familiar with Gradle (I think that's a Java build system?), but if I saw what actually happened, I could probably understand well enough.
> I'm not familiar with [...] but if I saw what actually happened, I could probably understand well enough.
That's probably exactly what those who closed it thought: "I'm not familiar with it, but I'm certainly a better judge than the person who is working with it".
Do you realise that you are going around telling everybody who complains about the StackOverflow moderation that they were certainly wrong, and StackOverflow was certainly right, and if they showed you the specific question you could certainly teach them why they are wrong? That would be the first step to understanding why people don't really enjoy your behaviour.
>Do you realise that you are going around telling everybody who complains about the StackOverflow moderation that they were certainly wrong, and StackOverflow was certainly right, and if they showed you the specific question you could certainly teach them why they are wrong?
No. s/certainly/probably/g.
And I say this because I have a large amount of evidence - from cases where I was a subject matter expert - that the overwhelming majority of these cases turn out to be ones in which the proposed duplicate was very obviously a duplicate.
People really will go up to you and tell you straight faced that no, this is a completely different situation because of a detail that is in fact completely irrelevant to the problem. And that the answers on the duplicate won't work, when they haven't tried. And I've had it happen that I can show these people directly that the answers actually do work in their case.
> And I say this because I have a large amount of evidence - from cases where I was a subject matter expert - that the overwhelming majority of these cases turn out to be ones in which the proposed duplicate was very obviously a duplicate.
I think you miss something basic here. Nobody is saying "no question should ever be closed as a duplicate". What I am saying, is that I have had many of my own questions, where I was an SME, that were closed as duplicate where in fact they were not duplicates and the answers on the "duplicate" were not even applicable. By "many" I mean "enough for me to consider StackOverflow moderation toxic and leaving.
Because many questions are actually duplicates doesn't mean that all are duplicates. But you don't seem to be even remotely open to the idea that it can ever happen that a question is wrongly closed as a duplicate. Again, I have had questions closed where I listed the "similar questions" suggested by SO and explained why they were not duplicates. Do you think the moderators would have discussed it with me? It felt like they didn't even read my question entirely because in some cases I can't get how someone who knows how to read may ignore my "warning: this is not a duplicate of X because [...]".
Please feel free to show concrete examples, and I'd be happy to try to explain the reasoning.