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This is just a suggestion from me. I suggest for all of us to restrain first from downvoting or voting to close a question, instead we should comment first on how the user can improve his/her questions, especially to those new users.

In reality, most of new users are excited to use this site without reading the FAQs. They are excited to participate so they ignore the site's rules, thus having them ask not-so-good questions or answers. So, being users who have more understanding on how the site really works, we have to be a little considerate on them, to not lure them away from using the site.

I, myself has gone through this and I admit it, it is a bit discouraging to have your questions downvoted or closed. But when I got used to the site's rules and understood how it works, I got more comfortable. I don't know if I'm being too paranoid or a bit off-topic but with our questions per day dropping I think we should be concern with this.

This new question got me troubled. As you can see, the user is a bit frustrated as to why his question got downvoted and has votes to close.

The bottomline of what I'm suggesting is, let's be a little more considerate of the new users and consider commenting first before downvoting or voting to close. If the user didn't modify his/her question after having comments on how to improve the question or answer, then probably that's the time to downvote or vote to close.

Again, this is just a suggestion and I mean no harm.

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Although I understand your concern, either you provided a bad example question or I just don't agree with you. That question needs to be closed, even if it is a question by a new user. You said it yourself in a comment you left there:

The question you asked will invite opinion-based answers and might cause never-ending speculated answers and it means it can't really be answered. The answers won't have reliable source that can back it up since it is purely based on the user's opinions.

Plus, if you read this in the help center, you'll see the question just does not fit the SE model. This is taken from "What types of questions should I avoid asking?":

you are asking an open-ended, hypothetical question: “What if ______ happened?”

And just to finish things off, just read the first paragraph of the latest SE blog post:

It pains me when I hear people say that our sites are unfriendly, or that we chase new users away. But it’s a hard problem, because our highest priority has always been the quality of content on our sites. And it still is. We can’t lower our standards. We won’t.


Having said this, I understand that sometimes we may seem harsh on new users, and that could be solved by commenting instead of downvoting. However, that's not always the case, as some questions are just plain bad or simply do not fit the Q&A model we have. Now the important part here, is that whenever you close a question, you should leave a comment explaining why you did it.

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    An addendum: Even more now than prior to the new close reasons, users are encouraged to edit their questions to be better. They will automatically be populated in the reopen queue if the user edits it, and we can decide that it is good enough to be reopened. That is ultimately up to the user, though, so it's important they understand why their question is wrong and let them fix it. (But "closing" it in the meantime is in no way harmful.)
    – Cattua
    Jun 28, 2013 at 15:34
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Not sure if you noticed, but the example question you've linked has no less than 5 (now 6, including mine) comments explaining why his question isn't good, and only 2 votes down, plus 2 votes to close.

Voting is part of the site, you get rewarded for good posts, and "stung" for bad ones. That's one of the main points of the site, and it's the reason the Stack Exchange model has become successful.

Commenting and explaining things to the user is nice, but it's less meaningful without actually feeling "the sting".

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