[lolinder]

It might be reasonable to assume of the original asker, but it's unfair to the dozens of people who follow in their footsteps and find their question years later.

I've lost track of the number of times that I need to X (even though I know Y is an option that is probably better in most circumstances) and had to dig through dozens of "do Y instead" answers before finally finding something helpful. More often than not the original asker actually accepts Y as the answer and thanks the responder, but now the search space for X is polluted with yet another non-answer.

I agree with another commenter downthread—the best response when you think you're looking at an XY problem is to answer both X and Y. That way you can be sure that the naive asker is set on the right path (if they are in fact naive), but you're still logging the answer to X so that searches for it don't become useless.

[falserum]

> but it's unfair to the dozens of people who follow in their footsteps and find their question years later.

Exactly.

In similar fashion: duplicate questions are alternative ways how people can find the question. (I.e. Useful for later searchers)

[MisterSandman]

I can see you’re getting downvoted but I 100% agree. StackExchange is so, so bad at this - they will close a question because there’s like a 75% overlap with a different question.

[falserum]

Duplicates could be useful if they are properly linked with earlier question/answer. (Something like “import answer” could be useful)