I don't understand the downvoting and criticism of this new user question

Question

• oneliner which should redirect

This is getting various close vote reasons I don't understand.

Currently tally is 4 close votes and it is one vote away from being closed.

No on has actually stated why they are voting but from comments one can "guess" who is.

Note I understand Windy's comments and >50% agree with him.

Can someone post answers here on why it should be closed?

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Update

OP just posted comment a minute ago. Answers helped them out.

I guess my concern now is:

Is this the way we treat new users to Ask Ubuntu closing their question within 24 hours?

After all we were all new users to Linux at one point and I think for new people we should hold their hand a bit...

Answer 1

Is this the way we treat new users to Ask Ubuntu closing their question within 24 hours?

After all we were all new users to Linux at one point and I think for new people we should hold their hand a bit..

New users simply don't have knowledge. There's nothing wrong with that! The problem with this question wasn't that the OP didn't know how to do what they wanted to do. It was that the OP seems to have put no effort at all into solving it. That reads like a homework assignment and, instead of trying to do their work, the OP came to an online Q&A site and dumped their assignment on us so we can do their work for them.

The question had four main parts:

• Identify .conf files in /etc.
• Get their sizes.
• Print output to a file.
• Print errors to another file.

If the OP had even tried to solve just one of those, the question would have been received much differently. If they'd said something like "I read up on how I can redirect to a file" or "I found I can use find" or "I know I can get the size with ..." or something, anything that shows that they tried a little and didn't just go to someone else to do their homework for them. But they didn't seem to have tried to solve any one of those issues.

As it stands, the question feels like the OP just wants someone else to do al the work. It feels as though the asker isn't here to learn how to do something, but only to avoid doing it. So, personally, I find the downvotes and the close votes completely justified. It should be closed as too broad, in my opinion, not as unclear, but I do agree that closing is valid. And downvoting it is certainly valid, that's a typical example of a question that should be downvoted for lack of effort.

Answer 2

I added my questions as a comment on the post:

Please clarify: Which operating system and version do you use? Which permission errors are you referring to? Do you need the individual sizes or the total size of these files? What have you tried, and where did it fail?

Some of these questions are there for hours in other comments, but still OP has failed to address them – the post actually seems abandoned. As it stands, the question does qualify for both “unclear” and “too broad”: There is not even a clear question, see the extended comment discussion resulting from this fact.

As for the downvotes, people are generally free to do that at will, but the guideline (see mouseover) says:

This question does not show any research effort; it is unclear or not useful (click again to undo)

As it stands, the first two of these three objectively match, while the third may subjectively.

Answer 3

I only gave a comment that I don't like the question as is but also understand it is lack of knowledge from the user. Never downvoted. Never close voted (if I leave a comment like that I wait for others to vote).

The amount of comments clearly indicate there are things wrong with the question :)