Overzealous duplicate marking

Question

In my opinion, the mods on this site are way overzealous about marking things duplicate.

Quite often the first time someone asks a question the question and answer can be suboptimal. Maybe the first question is harder to find, less clear, or burdened by heavy discussion.

Example 1 "Change file's timestamp":

Here's the question I found, which is marked as duplicate:
How can I change the timestamp on a file?

The wording is perfect is you want to change a file's timestamp. Also, this question has been viewed over 73k times. However, it's marked as a duplicate of these questions:
How to modify timestamp in a dll or exe?
Windows equivalent of the Linux command 'touch'?

Both of these questions might tell you how to modify a timestamp, but it's not at all obvious by the title. If someone doesn't already know that touch can modify a timestamp, then they would never know that's a good place to look.

The "modify timestamp in a dll" answer has only been viewed 7k times, and it's a year older than the "duplicate".

Example 2 "Unable to rsync"

Recently my question Unable to rsync to another volume with Git Bash was marked as a duplicate of Why cwRsync doesn't work on Windows?.

This example has three issues.

1. First, the "original" question was never marked answered, but there's a somewhat highly voted answer so I don't know if it was just never marked or actually never answered.

2. Second, I don't know if that program is the same. Sure, there's definitely some shared code between this rsync and the cwRsync, but I still don't know if they're the same. (Also many things can clearly cause the same error messages).

3. Third, to prove that I researched the question I had to provide so much proof that now my question is polluted by all the things that didn't work. Someone who wants to answer or ask the same thing shouldn't have to relive my hours of research that I spent trying to answer this question, which I had originally edited down to a relatively short question.

Quite often on the StackExchange platform I find questions that I want answered but they're marked as duplicate or locked and the "original" (or old and outdated answers) don't answer my question. There's no good place to ask "hey, how does this other thing solve this problem?" or perhaps "hey, is that other thing solved?".

Answer 1

Duplicate questions aren't necessarily bad. As you pointed out, it's entirely possible that people who did some research in the first example wouldn't have found the dupe target. Duplicates can be valuable as signposts, pointing people to a single place to get answers. (Fragmentation is bad, because it's hard to find all the solutions if they're all on different-but-the-same questions.)

As for your second example, I personally wouldn't have voted to close it; it looked to me like the tools are different. (But some people disagreed, evidently.) I did participate in the reopening of it though. Thanks for editing your question with additional information - that definitely helps get incorrect duplicate closures reversed, and I hope you continue to do such things.

Final note: no moderators were involved in the closure of your question. People who hold gold badges in the tag can perform unilateral duplicate closures and reopenings, as happened here. For more information, see the Meta Stack Exchange post that created that ability.