@jtd The graphs do not take views into account. That is just votes per post.

@Seth Arqade very nicely managed to keep them all at score 0 for the duration of the election. (Without even coordinating that.)

Considering the size of the close vote queue, I don't think flagging (more importantly, the lack thereof) is that much the problem.

Well, MSO is different. For one, they can use bounties to bump questions, which is a really big help. That said, I can't say I've noticed them actually closing PSA/call-to-action style questions as duplicates of much older questions - which might just be because they usually don't get such questions. SO doesn't have too many recurring problems (the huge close queue on SO is pretty much the only thing I can think of) that aren't addressed with [feature-request]s or [faq]s.

Generally speaking, duplicates on meta are irrelevant. We use them for [support] and [feature-request] questions (because time usually isn't a factor for them), but [discussion] questions usually serve more as a PSA/call to action kind of thing, so bringing that up frequently and with fresh eyes isn't a bad idea. Instead of duplicating, we just leave a "Related:" link instead. :)

@Fischer One could make a data.SE query and group by week, for a history, but there's also the tag overview, which contains statistics on recently asked questions in those tags.