Should a "high traffic" Q with an Accepted A be marked as a duplicate of a lower traffic Q asked years later?

Question

A {duplicate} marker links these two Qs:

How to prevent my friends from seeing my friends’ list on Facebook

How do I control who can see my Friends List?

Some stats for each:

Former
Asked 4 years, 4 months ago
Viewed 100,539 times
1 A, Accepted

Latter
Asked 2 year 4 months ago
Viewed 8,911 times
2 As, one Accepted

The former’s A was offered two years before the latter Q was posted with its Acceptance within one month of being offered.

The Closure seems to have been made in response to a Close vote from the user who posted the later question (coupled with a binding vote from a mod). Obviously the Closure message includes:

This question has been asked before and already has an answer.

which (as is the case on other occasions) is not true, since it is the earlier version that is Closed, at present.

On meta I have not seen either Q discussed (relying mainly on usage of the tag canonical-question). One of the two instances of use of that tag is indeed about Facebook (and asked by the user who VTC’d above) but is about account recovery rather than friends lists.

The viewer response unhelpful/helpful ratio for the former is 1.48, and for the latter 1.88 and nearly three times as much feedback provided for the former as for the latter.

The former has averaged over duration about four times as many views during its existence as the latter.

Is the {duplicate} indicator on the wrong Q?

Answer 1

Generally, if both questions have answers, we want the "master" to be the better question with the better answers. The date shouldn't matter.

In this particular case, I think it's pretty much a toss-up. I think the question marked as a duplicate has a little more detail, but I think the accepted answer on the "master" is better.

Since the purpose of marking questions as duplicates is to keep the information in one place and to help people using different search terms to ultimately find what they're looking for. I don't see that there's anything to add to either question, unless the Facebook changes their process. The duplicate question is only closed; it and its answers can still receive votes.

I don't think it's necessary to "swap" them.

(Full disclosure: One of the questions is mine, but I honestly don't care if it's the "master" or the "duplicate".)

Answer 2

As I disagree with the alternative answer I am posting my own to have something to Accept.

1. I agree with the principle expressed in the other A but not that the actual quality differential in this case is sufficient to be the determining factor. There is no clear-cut difference.

2. It is very useful to have input from an involved user - one who both subsequently posted the Open Q and then VTC'd the (earlier) 'dupe' - but for this post it would be more useful to have an impartial opinion as well, and none has been offered.

3. Since posting this Q the view count for the 'dupe' has increased by over 5,600 and that for the 'master' by barely 800, with totals currently over 100,000 'dupe' and under 10,000 'master'. That is a lot of viewers being offered redirection needlessly, since the indirect page adds nothing worthwhile.