Duplicate of closed proposal - does that make sense?

Question

Proposal: Big Data

At the time of writing, this proposal is one day old - an hour ago it was closed:

closed as duplicate of Big Data by jmort253, warren, Manishearth, THelper, Mark Booth 1 hour ago

^{This proposal covers the same ground as another proposal; it would tend to drain audience from another Stack Exchange site.}

The old proposal was closed 9 days ago at the time of writing after 13 days in public beta because it didn't have enough activity.

How can a new proposal drain audience from another Stack Exchange site if that site has already been closed?

At least for the proposals closed after 2 years in Area 51, one can try to get a new site off the ground. Why wouldn't that be possible for proposals that have been closed due to low activity?

Answer 1

No, it doesn't make sense. The Big Data site was very recently just closed. Perhaps folks hadn't noticed; or perhaps folks might have thought it was too soon to try again — but that's an argument for closing it as 'not viable', not for being a duplicate.

Closing a site does not mean folks cannot try again… if they have reason to believe they can make a better go of it the second time around. I'm not speculating whether this particular subject is ready to try again, but we could just as easily have closed Big Data in the proposal stage. When we close proposals for lack of an audience, we often encourage users to gather more support to try again. Big Data simply got a bit further along than most.

At times, we may close proposals/sites that simply should not be their own Q&A. But I don't believe sites closed for other reasons should be used as a head-on-a-stack gesture that they should never become sites at all — "We already tried this; it didn't work. Go away!" That's not how Area 51 works.