I appreciate that SO has a focus specifically on answerable programming questions, and that people are willing to protect it.
On the other hand, I find the the "questions police" are sometimes a little too hasty to shut down actually useful questions, that may stray a bit into the grey zone or may not be phrased as well as possible. I see a lot of new users posting questions that aren't quite clear enough, and then rather than commenting in a way that will help them clarify the question, people just downvote, vote to close, and move on.
There are some people who are just hopeless; no matter how much guidance on asking good questions you provide, they won't get it. But you shouldn't assume that when someone asks a question, and just vote to close. It can really hurt to have a question downvoted or closed, and put someone off the site. I think those tools should be used only for blatantly abusive or off topic questions, or users who really don't get it and keep asking the same things over and over again.
Keep in mind, Stack Overflow gets somewhere north of 8K questions per day. Every day. There's a limit to how much hand-holding anyone's willing to do in the face of that - particularly given how often it simply does not accomplish anything.
That said, if you're the conscientious sort and do listen to the advice given for improving your question... It'll get reviewed and possibly re-opened. If nothing else, you'll at least have learned something you can put to use the next time you ask a question.
Something else worth considering... Most of the moderation is done by (or at very least instigated by) the same folks answering the questions. So if you're active in a bit more of a niche tag (for instance, [firefox]) and you've done your homework to where the folks answering can actually help you... You're a lot more likely to get help.
@Shog9 One of the things I take issue with is when I am busy trying to help someone ask a better question, several other people are busy downvoting and voting to close which scares them off. There are a lot of people who have just the minimal reputation needed to vote to close, who seem a lot more interested in closing anything that they don't understand right away than trying to figure out what the person is really asking about and actually helping them.
Here's an example: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/19964962/html5-filesystem... It wasn't the best phrased question, but it was reasonably obvious what he was asking. Instead of trying to help him phrase his question better, or actually answer him, several people told him to "just Google it" or linked to tutorials that didn't answer his question while downvoting him and voting to close. Eventually, after I actually answered the question (which did take a little research, the only documentation I found was the spec which took a little parsing through to figure out how it was supposed to work), he got fed up with the number of downvotes and deleted the question.
This isn't an isolated example, it happens a lot. I've had lots of cases where there was a question that wasn't perfectly clear but if you read between the lines a bit you could figure out what they were asking, where lots of people just voted to close, wasting the time I took to actually try to answer the question correctly. It's harmful to the community.
And as you can see in this thread, there are a lot of people who are scared off by this behavior; who don't use SO because of the treatment they got. I definitely understand people's frustration with people who ask poor questions, but part of the point of SO is that you can, through commenting and editing, improve questions, and far too many people are too happy to just make a snide comment and downvote rather than actually trying to help.
(heh, funny that I defaulted to using SO-style "@Shog9" when discussing the topic on HN; it's interesting how I fall into that habit when replying to someone I recognize from SO, despite being on HN at the time)
Ugh, I hate those comments. Reminds me too much of forum cruft. Or that xda-developers video. If you see that crap cropping up, please flag it; they're easy enough to get rid of.
As you say, there's a bit of a "man with a hammer" problem with folks who've gained access to the tooling without really learning how (or when) to use it. I'm working on some better guidance there, but it can be hard to redirect that impulse. If you have any good suggestions, don't hesitate to ping me in The Tavern (http://chat.meta.stackoverflow.com/rooms/89/tavern-on-the-me...). "@Shog9" should actually do something there ;-)
On the other hand, I find the the "questions police" are sometimes a little too hasty to shut down actually useful questions, that may stray a bit into the grey zone or may not be phrased as well as possible. I see a lot of new users posting questions that aren't quite clear enough, and then rather than commenting in a way that will help them clarify the question, people just downvote, vote to close, and move on.
There are some people who are just hopeless; no matter how much guidance on asking good questions you provide, they won't get it. But you shouldn't assume that when someone asks a question, and just vote to close. It can really hurt to have a question downvoted or closed, and put someone off the site. I think those tools should be used only for blatantly abusive or off topic questions, or users who really don't get it and keep asking the same things over and over again.
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