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Your question was neither deleted nor locked. It was closed as a duplicate, which immediately provides a link to existing useful information and helps keep the site organized by putting the best answers in one place.

My extensive experience has been that the overwhelming majority of the time that people complain "this isn't a duplicate", it actually quite obviously is. (And there were even more irritating complaints on the meta site at times; all the way up to the level of "you shouldn't ever close duplicates at all because I think you shouldn't", demonstrating no interest in even trying to understand the reasons for doing so.) Of course, people do make mistakes; there was an entire process for fixing this, but most people could not be bothered to engage with it productively (or even civilly). But feel free to give examples of things that you feel were wrongly closed from your own experience.

by kstrauser20 minutes ago|

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It's astonishing how vastly different our experiences were. I trawled the new Python questions frequently, looking for fun, novel things to answer. It was dismaying how often they'd been wrongly marked as dupes, often because the original answer was ancient and obsolete. It would often be egregiously bad, like:

Q: How do Python's dict preserve insertion order?

A: [duplicate of "Why does a Python dict's keys have a different ordering each run?"]

It was clear that the mod/curator/whatever spent no time attempting to understand what was actually being asked, and linked it to something that was completely incorrect as an answer to the real question.

I saw this constantly, so frequently that I'd be hard pressed to answer with specifics. If you asked me "when did you last eat a fruit bat", I can tell you the month and year because that stood out. If you asked me "when did you last eat spaghetti", I'd have a hard time saying.