> When you're composing a question it will dynamically show links to related answers. So the author has already seen possible duplicates, right?
Okay, presumably you're familiar with the experience of seeing these links. When you saw them, how much effort did you put into opening them in new tabs and checking whether they answer your question? I'm guessing, not a lot. The UI affordance isn't great. The semantic search is just not very good (and it has to filter through massive piles of dreck) and it constantly updates; it shows you answer counts and doesn't try to sort or filter what it shows you for quality; but most importantly someone writing a question isn't expecting it, and checking it breaks the flow of drafting the question.
> Yet them seem quick to play the Closed for Duplicate card.
My experience has been that the very large majority of these closures are correct, and the large majority of closures complained about on the meta site are very obviously correct and the objections often boil down to trivialities and/or a general opposition to the idea of closing duplicates at all (without attempting to understand the reasons for doing so).
> The other thing is it will say, "New Contributor, be nice." and their question will have -5 or more downvotes. I think that's because the auto closer needed -5 to trigger or something. I could be wrong. Either way, to a newbie it just looks like they're piling on hate for no reason.
No. It's because the downvotes are for quality rating and are explicitly not intended as a rebuke to the OP, regardless of account age or reputation. Also because they affect sort order; because non-duplicates can't be immediately closed, people who want the question closed (note: the explicit, sole purpose of closing a question is to prevent it from receiving new answers) have a vested interest in hiding it from the sort of users who try to answer everything without heed to quality or suitability.