StackOverflow is one of the most hostile sites I've ever tried to use.
I vividly remember asking a question before was different in a subtle but important way from existing ones (which I'd seen) and it got marked as a duplicate.
Did you state that you'd seen those questions/answers, and why they did not cover the subtleties of your situation? While it sounds like gate-keeping to require you to provide this information up-front, it saves other people's time giving you answers (including links to those questions/answers) that are not relevant. “State what you have already tried” is mentioned up-front in all the places that describe how to ask a good question, and is good advice more generally, away from SO, too.
My experience from asking about that here earlier is that they seldom can. Their well-worded and perfect questions maybe weren't that good in retrospect when they dug it up again?
I've seen many questions like the OP describes with my own eyes though. Marked as duplicate. With helpful answers saying "this is a duplicate of X..." in spite of the question stating they don't do X but something that sounds like X.
Also your answer sounds like your average SO moderator's :)
What people who only use stackoverflow superficially don't get is that stackoverflow is not a community, but a collection of communities that coalesce around major tags.
I, for example, frequent almost exclusively the Java tag and I can assure you that the question we mark as duplicates the most are very few:
- How to compare strings in java (because people keep using == instead of `.equals()`
- Why doesn't this class/array change when I pass it to a method (because java is pass-by-value, not pass-by-reference)[1]
- What does "cannot find symbol" mean (where the duplicate target helpfully explain in what cases this could happen, including, but not limited to "you declared it inside a loop so it's not visible outside) [2]
- Why my scanner skips reading a line in this loop (because every time you use `nextFoo` where `Foo` is not `Line` you need to read the newline as well before continuing)[3]
The other sort of questions we tend to close are the one easily answerable by learning any basic tutorial, the ones that tell us "my code doesn't work" without showing their code, the ones that just dump their homework and expect us to write a solution. And casual user rarely see this questions because we usually also delete them, but I can assure that most of our moderation time is spent handling this kind of stuff, not closing as duplicate.
On the other hand, one kind of question that is not well received but IMHO should not lead to closing or downvoting (but it does) is "I want to do this weird and non-idiomatic thing. How do I do it}". Unless, of course, it's an actual XY problem, in which case it helps if the person asking the question states why they want to do such a thing.
All of this to say, your experience with the site will vary depending on what technology you're asking about.
And "your answer sounds like your average SO moderator's" yes, it does, because we use the site a lot and we know what we're talking about :)
> I can assure you that the question we mark as duplicates the most
I can assure you that when I end up on SO I somehow run into questions like I described. Or I have a problem like I described but I don't bother asking a SO question because I know the mods will descend on me like vultures :)
SO moderation may be good for beginner questions like you describe, but I'm past those and my problems tend to be pretty subtle.
> your experience with the site will vary
Well my experience with the site tends to be zero these days, unless a search brings me there. I used to look for questions to answer in my areas of expertise on my morning coffee, but then the push for ready to copy/paste answers happened and my answers that tried to get the asker to think for themselves weren't good any more.
I vividly remember asking a question before was different in a subtle but important way from existing ones (which I'd seen) and it got marked as a duplicate.