> Back in the day, questions were all valid. It was the way devs should work. If you posted an identical question, so what? Who did it hurt? That was never the

> Back in the day, questions were all valid. It was the way devs should work. If you posted an identical question, so what? Who did it hurt? That was never the case; duplicates were around back in the day as well. The idea is to build a long-term repository of useful questions, and millions of duplicate questions if not helpful for that. If I answered question X with great detail and lots of context then I really don't want to do that every month, so, you mark it as a duplicate, and in principle everyone wins with this. I'm not saying the process always works brilliantly in practice and I agree there are too many curmudgeons around and that sometimes questions get closed as duplicates too fast, but the basic idea of it is fine.