I've had some trouble. Maybe it's just that I'm used to seeing the "Related" posts in the duplicate dialog, but I find now that finding an appropriate duplicate is more difficult now that other "matches" are thrown in.
I also find that the new restriction on answered-only questions multiplies the time it takes to dup-close this rubbish (a daily task taken on by those of us who do not wish to see php and mysql implode under their own weight) by some noticeable factor.
That is, the topic used to be a nice chain of duplicates and nobody really cared whether each one had an answer, because eventually you'd get to the one canonical question that did. Now I have to try to find that myself by browsing the half-million duplicates manually to find the canonical one with decent answers. This is time that I don't have.
- That all said, my exposure to the new feature is brand new. So these are my initial thoughts.
The rationale here is that it can be fairly hard to discern whether or not an unanswered question is actually a duplicate
I don't see what the question's duplicateness has to do with answers.
Even when it is closing doesn't really accomplish very much
It accomplishes there no longer being two open, identical questions in existence, clogging up the tubes and making my OCD hurt.
@fbueckert said it best here:
This new rule seems to encourage dupes of unanswered questions, which, if no one can answer the question, means we just gather un-closable questions.
When searching for a "canonical" answer in particular, duplicates without answers (or with bad answers) are just noise in the results.
No more noise than they were originally. That post X is marked as a dup of Y doesn't
in any way change the noise level of Y. It just means that we haven't added to the noise by having X open as well.
I'd also argue that there's a scenario I've seen a few times where a really poor question has been asked, then closed (as, say, NARQ) without answers. Then the OP, disgruntled, has simply asked it again. Now we're not able to close that as a duplicate?
I get that we can simply NARQ the new one, too, but it hurts my brain that we can longer semantically mark that the OP did a double-post!
It feels like writing magic numbers in code, or re-writing a function definition in each translation unit in which it's used. Or including a value for pi in each source file rather than using some single definition imported from a library.
(edit: turns out same-user-posts are exempted, at least in theory, and I'd missed this.)
My 2p...
