Why wouldn't we reset all the votes on the question that is marked as dup?

Question

Sometimes when I see new question in our community I have strong feeling that I already saw the similar one before. I start searching and quite often it turns out that there are literally dozens of such questions already existing.

Some people (even those who are the members for quite a long time) provide their answers being aware of it is a dup (I believe they are) as (probably) it is easy way to gain upvotes. But such behavior encourages those who ask not to put effort to research the problem before asking. Hence we get hundreds of "NPEs in page objects", hundreds of "best/worst" questions and so on.

Why wouldn't we just reset all the votes on the question if it is marked as duplicate? Then the people who answer would also feel that they are responsible for community quality in the same degree (or even in the higher one) as those people who ask.

Answer 1

Because, in general, it isn't a big issue. If someone tired to do it as a way of farming reputation, it would be evidenced by a massive percentage of closed questions, which would probably lead to a question-ban. If they have a handful of questions that get upvotes before closed and such, well, they're probably meaningfully trying to participate in the community. At the very least, it's far more likely they're meaning well than they're not, and I for one would much rather let the single digits of people that manage to pull a fast one on me than to drive away someone that just made a mistake. Taking away reputation from someone will leave a bad taste in their mouth for sure.