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I have a habit of reviewing the latest posts at least once a day. Sometimes I realize that I have seen a particular question before and am able to mark it as a duplicate. Sometimes I check the SE if the question seems too obvious.
I wanted to know if there is some other way to identify duplicates or does the platform depend on user's memory(which is remarkably good in many cases) to identify duplicates.

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In the right column of a question are "related posts", which are questions that SE has identified as having similar keywords in the text. When looking at a post, take a look at the related questions listed. They may jar your memory; alternately, you can click on and read them, too.

And some questions are so simple you can't help but think "Someone must have asked this before." Someone probably has answered it, too.

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  • I had not considered the related posts idea. Thanks :)
    – Limit
    Dec 19, 2016 at 5:59
  • Afaik, the selection shown there is heavily driven by tags. So unless the asker tagged perfectly (and/or the same as the other questions) you will probably not be able to find the duplicate.
    – Raphael
    Dec 28, 2016 at 13:30
  • @Raphael, see the link in the question comments above provided by Braiam. It has a link to a paper that studied duplicate questions, they compared the results of an independent researcher looking for duplicates, and the paper ultimately found "[t]his would suggest that forum members are highly adept at recognising duplicates, even when they are not obvious at first sight." In other words, regardless of how the related question mechanism works, or if it relies purely on member knowledge, the outcome is effective.
    – John Deters
    Dec 28, 2016 at 14:05
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One of the privileges for those with gold tag badges is that they are allowed to close questions in that tag as dupes - based on the fact they obviously are very familiar with it.

This does work rather well, as the community member really only needs to remember the posts in their tag.

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