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    "I disagree we'd need to focus on appeasement of folks who're toxically insisting we're toxic or changing core design features in the hope it'll increase raw question counts" - a thousand times this. For me personally, the amount of questions is irrelevant, the signal-to-noise ratio is the main factor - and almost everything SE does continues to make this worse instead of better. Just having more questions when most of them are crap does not make me want to be an active answerer again. Commented Jan 12 at 12:40
  • but I disagree we'd need to focus on appeasement of folks who're toxically insisting we're toxic or changing core design features in the hope it'll increase raw question counts. Maybe not in the hope it'll increase raw question counts. But the issue persists. Recently there were a bunch of YT videos showing that particular statistic data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/1882532/… . And more than one of them went into detail of the toxicity abounding. I sure do hope the powers that be are aware and have a plan. Commented Jan 12 at 13:59
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    But is it? "My question was closed as a dupe" isn't toxicity. Its a system working as designed, with the parts of the system that were meant to mitigate that being broken, and all alternatives ignored. And there's been a focus on the unhappy folks for a while. Maybe its worth trying something different and not losing both groups of people. Commented Jan 12 at 16:04
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    @JourneymanGeek the perception matters here more than the reality or the intent. And I think this is an area SE should investigate as either a lot of people can't understand how the duplicates solve their issue, or we are actually making a significant amount of bad duplicate closures. Commented Jan 12 at 16:34
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    And spending some effort, and maybe even marketing on changing perceptions. I've a proposal for changing dupes stewing but I'm not quite happy with where it is yet tho. Commented Jan 12 at 22:57
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    @JourneymanGeek, "My question was closed as a dupe" - maybe not so toxic. But "My question was closed as a dupe, but it's not a dupe and none of those answers have anything remotely to do with my question anyway!" is kind of toxic. And before you ask me to provide a tome of examples, I'm merely posting the perception of new/seldom users. LLM's never close a question as a dupe. They might give the wrong answer based on very similar requests/questions because of the way they work, but they don't just close the chat box and say "Already been asked. Go look here. Good luck and goodbye". Commented Jan 14 at 17:54
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    "...maybe even marketing on changing perceptions" And I don't think marketing is going to help much either. I'm getting a bad vibe about how this is all going. This feels like trying to get a VHS producer to market the advantages they have over DVD's. Sure there might some arguments there, some perhaps very well made, but it's blatantly apparent who's going to win that one. The thing that SO has over all LLM's is new knowledge creation and archiving. But how many of those questions/answers have there ever been? I suspect it's always been a small percentage - hence the need for moderators. Commented Jan 14 at 17:55
  • They likely wouldn't get it indeed - but I'd rather one user who gets is and is in for the long run, than someone who's going to get immediately mad, or worse, never comes here cause they believed some random person on another site, who might or might not ever come here. Commented Jan 14 at 23:41