[crispyambulance]

> I tend to think the real problem is the overly strict conception of duplicate.

It's true, people are so damn trigger-happy marking questions as duplicates.

I've seen new, well-posed questions on up-to-date frameworks get marked as dupe because 10 years ago someone asked a related question on an obsolete tech. The reason it was marked as dupe was simply because someone took it upon themselves to write up a sprawling smug "canonical" answer to a shitty old question that happened to cover the new subject matter.

It's much better to keep the old questions and answers, to just answer each question (and no more), and to create new questions as needed. Why not? it's not like they're running out of disk space.

I think the solution here is to encourage specific answers to specific questions, let folks sort out the historical minutiae based on timestamps and subject. Anything more elaborate is asking for mix-ups and confusion.

[misnome]

> The reason it was marked as dupe was simply because someone took it upon themselves to write up a sprawling smug "canonical" answer to a shitty old question that happened to cover the new subject matter.

This seems an optimistic view. What feels an awful lot of the time it just has some of the same outside appearances, and is a different question completely, but the people marking it as dupe don’t read it carefully enough, or don’t know enough about the subject to realise the differences.

[jrumbut]

I will say, compared to the past, it's gotten better. They seem more likely to let a good effort possible duplicate go now.

Still, it is my quixotic StackOverflow crusade and there remains more to do.