I see that the "close as duplicate" feature continues to undergo changes. Unfortunately, I must report negatively on this newest one.
This time, it's that a banner is added to a question as soon as the very first dup-vote is cast:
This just seems:
Ripe for Abuse: you can vote for absolutely anything and get it added to the question in a manner that looks official;
You get an official-looking sanction for a dup-vote, regardless of the fact that you haven't yet attracted enough agreement to meet the requirements to actually close the thing.
A single duplicate vote is hardly worthy of such a prominent display — if a question is truly a duplicate, worry not! Your excellent high-reputation regulars, even though you don't seem to trust us nowadays, are more than capable of identifying a true duplicate and closing it in short order. There's really no reason to undermine our community-powered discipline by advertising the initial vote in this fashion.
I would ask why so many changes are being applied without community input? And, if you need a non-OCD practical question, what problem does this change solve?
Consider this situation:
- Question X becomes hot due to Reddit or the Multicollider.
- Bob sees question X but wants attention for his (unrelated) question Y.
- Bob casts dupe close-vote on X with destination Y.
- Much of the traffic pouring into X is now redirected to (unrelated) question Y.
- Tons of nasty comments from confused users over why the banner is there for an unrelated question Y.
Yes, this type of abuse would warrant severe moderator consequences. But unlike vandalism edits, this banner cannot be removed (by normal users).
So you're allowing a single user to do so much damage that cannot be reversed without a moderator.
And here's the other (very common) example pulled from the comments:
- Bob sees a question. He (honestly) thinks it's a dupe.
- He casts a dupe-vote.
- 5 other uses point out that it is not a dupe.
- Bob agrees. But he can't do anything, other than to delete the auto-inserted comment.
The banner is still there. Left to mislead anyone who visits the question.
For how long? Until the vote ages away (5 days)?