So I just found a neat post on Discourse meta that explained the difference between locking and archiving. the diagram provided looks epic
How come topics are now archived rather than closed?
Archiving a topic locks it with a couple added benefits, like freezing likes/polls, stopping posts from being deleted (and edited I think?), and hides the thread from certain sorts.
There were a couple cases where closed topics would appear in the sorts, or people would try to boost the stats of their locked posts. This isn’t ideal because locked topics often contained misinformation or were irrelevant to the category. Using archive instead solves this without needing to unlist the thread (which is sometimes undesirable).
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