@JimmyHoffa well I used to think like you, closing crappy questions with "deserved" NC/NARQ, not bothering about dupes (dupe of crap = crap, why worry). I changed my mind...
...when I noticed that at MSO, they get and close a lot of crap, but there's much less tension around closures compared to Programmers. Upon digging into their practices closer I noticed that they mostly close crap as dupes. the more I thought about it, the more sense it made....
...I mean, yeah one can close NC/NARQ with minimal effort, but that has an implicit overhead of much whining - as opposed to dupes, which work exactly as Karl descibes,
That particular question fit multiple close reasons at once, but people can't select multiple reasons. I personally think it wasn't adequately similar to the dup, but duplicate is the most helpful close reason, because it points you to a question where you might get at least part of your questio...
...that's sort of a compromize. One doesn't insist on the question being crapp NC / NARQ, invests some effort into finding a dupe, and in return one gets a "civil peace" - much less whining...
...Of course this works only on simple, low effort questions - finding a dupe for these is typically a low effort as well. Try it yourself
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