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This question is a question I voted to close because the solution was a hunch I suggested in the comments. The original poster confirmed my hunch and I then voted to close as dupe as a result.

Okay, that is normal: Something gets flagged, others vote and a question closes (or languishes but that is another story).

But today I saw something different. Maybe I never noticed this before, but it seems like my close vote was then confirmed and sealed by the “Community” user/bot. How the heck did that happen?

I assume the internal workings of Stack Exchange moderation logic is kept deliberately opaque, but is this now a normal thing? I assume machine learning of some sort was used to compare questions or even check comments?

Screenshot below of the notice for reference.

enter image description here

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    Most likely the original poster also voted to close the question as a duplicate as well. As the original poster lacks the privileges to close questions Community stepped in instead. I thought we had a question about this already but I can't find it.
    – Mokubai Mod
    Aug 5, 2022 at 16:37
  • @Mokubai Good to know. If there is a dupe and you can flag it as such, feel free to close this!
    – Giacomo1968
    Aug 5, 2022 at 16:38
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    Found it, apparently the asker gets a "yep that did it" button and then Community does the job.
    – Mokubai Mod
    Aug 5, 2022 at 16:40
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    @Mokubai “If the user chooses that button, the Community user casts the final duplicate vote, thereby saving close vote reviewers the trouble of closing a question that the author knows is a duplicate.” Ahhhhh! Makes sense! The user agrees in a separate interface and if that is confirmed, the “Community” user closes the question. Perfectly sane logic. Thanks for clearing this up.
    – Giacomo1968
    Aug 5, 2022 at 16:42
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    As you say it's a nice quick interface that removes the need of waiting for 4 more people to go "yeah that's a dupe" and lets the author close the loop. meta.stackexchange.com/questions/250922/… shows the UI and it looks quite nice to be honest. Also explains why we get snarky "urgh, the dupe doesn't answer my question you idiots" edits occasionally.
    – Mokubai Mod
    Aug 5, 2022 at 16:45

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