I wish I could see the actual comments from others that irritated Rob but it seems like I can't find his SO profile. (Did Rob Conery delete his SO profile?[1])
Even if Jon Skeet's essay doesn't apply to RC, I think his assessment of "low quality" questions needs more dissection and it is missing a key psychology. He writes:
>This is a low-quality question, in my view. (I’ll talk more about that later.)
>[...]
>– but I think it’s important to accept that there are such things as low-quality questions,
Yes, Jon is correct that low-quality questions are a real problem but he's missing why they persist... the "askers" don't know enough to run their question through a self-diagnostic test to determine they are asking a low quality question. To beginners, it's a "high quality" question by one criteria: "I don't know the answer."
If they knew the answer -- they wouldn't be asking it! <-- That is the psychology that's very difficult to solve.
The SO experts want interesting and high quality questions to answer. If no questions were filtered out (closed), there would be too much crap to wade through and the site becomes a waste of their volunteer time. On the other hand, the beginners want their questions answered. Their questions being closed is a "toxic" environment and "unwelcoming."
I've given a lot of thought about what the optimal Q&A website would look like and I've determined you always have an unresolved tension between naive beginners and experts.
I would challenge anybody to come up with a Q&A system that filters questions in a way that the majority of askers who got their questions closed/deleted will agree that it was "fair".
To get a usable site, you have to favor the answerers over the askers because the experts are the ones contributing the valuable content.
[1] https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:YFH2o5...