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I've been a heavy user of SO/SE for quite some time on and off. I never really understood the issue other longtime users have with "bad questions".

It's one thing when it's something obvious like a question with no punctuation, plaintext or screenshot used for code instead of the Markdown syntax, incomprehensibly bad writing, etc. But scope is very hard for new users to get right, and having a hair trigger on the "off topic" close seems unnecessary to me. When I get tired of seeing a particular type of question, I simply try to figure out what tag it tends to have and start ignoring that tag.

Deleting and closing questions, IMO, is the nuclear option. Much like a nuke, it solves the problem but there is a lot of collateral damage to the environment. It's much better to convince the author to edit and improve their questions. This has several beneficial effects:

* Site gains a better quality question
* New user is convinced that they *are* qualified to participate in the site and the moderators are *reasonable*
* Site gains a "good" new user (one who takes feedback and improves their participation)

None of these happen if you close or delete the question (or even downvote, [IMO](https://meta.codidact.com/posts/288266)) without the author understanding what's wrong and what they're supposed to do instead. Which, for new users, is almost all the time.

You really can't expect a new user of a Q&A site to do much work before asking their first question - they'll maybe take a minute or two to glance through what's there, and use their best guess about what's appropriate. After all, why should they bother learning a bunch of our rules when they don't even know yet that the site is worth participating in to begin with?

It sounds to me like a "put on slippers or sweep the world" problem. Why should we go to the effort of ensuring perfect compliance to complex rules from thousands of newbies, when instead we can just allow the users to filter out questions they don't want to see? We already have a great implementation of tags and ways to filter on tags. We can just use those for many things. For example:

* `beginner-question` for things that are answered by reading the respective "getting started" doc article (which you should have read anyway, tut tut). Or maybe even make an `rtfm` tag.
* `open-ended` tag for subjective questions without one right answer
* `recommendation` tag - obvious
* `homework` tag for questions that grind the gears of anti-homework folks, whether they are genuinely homework or not
* `specific-troubleshooting` for questions asking about a very specific situation (can't name this `troubleshooting` because that should be used for general troubleshooting questions like "how do I print local variables in my exception traces")
* `design` when OP is asking for a whole program instead of just one specific thing
* `general-advice` for questions where the scope is too broad and it would not be possible to address all details

The idea is to come up with a tag for common types of question that cause contention, and start tagging them. Then people on the negative side of that contention can simply hide the tag, without having to lobby the entire community to get their way (and instigating a political struggle with their opponents on the other side of the contention). Importantly, this insulates new users from the subtleties of site meta-politics.

So my **moderation policy suggestion** is:

* When you see a bad question, strongly prefer tags and comments (constructive criticism) to address it
* Only use deletion, closing and downvotes ([subjective, I know](https://meta.codidact.com/posts/288266)) when the question absolutely, positively, *must* die. Examples:
    * Abandoned questions: OP omitted critical details, comments have not been responded to in ages, last login from OP is months ago
    * Illegal content
    * Spam (as in, commercial bots advertising a site, not just "newbie asked 5 questions in same day")

My **suggestion to power users** is:

* When you see a question that should be better, mentor the person on improving it
* When you see a type of question you hate, try hiding its tag
* Remember what it was like to be a newbie and not know the rules of this site
* If stupid newbie questions are really pissing you off, before you act on it, step away from the screen and go for a walk outside first

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PS1: I know the above is a *radical* proposal and I have no illusions that it would be adopted as is. However, I decided to post it (and phrase it strongly) because I think it's a perspective worth considering in this discussion. It's one of the "poles" of the dilemma, so to speak.

PS2: I wrote this with a coding bias, but I feel that it is obvious how you would extend the idea to non-coding sections of the site.