Here's my two cents on how to remedy the destructive downvotes oli was talking about.
Question titles should be questions
I think we should radically force each question title to actually be a question.
Often I see good edits to a question that nevertheless fail to rephrase the title as a question. That is so frustrating. This is a QA site. Any question with a title like
- Cannot install Ubuntu
- I have lost my wifi after an upgrade
is just not helpful and should not be answered nor edited without also editing the title. One can imagine thousands of different questions, but by writing them down explicitly, the title becomes an indication of whether a question is too localized or too general.
Hard on the close vote trigger
Personally I think close votes should be used a lot more. Any question that just really is a hardware problem, or something too localized should be closed without hesitating. The system is flooded by poor 'I am desparate' questions and not all support should come from this site.
Benefactors
I have seen it from time to time that a mod says 'we are going to make this question the basis for future "does ubuntu phone support device x' questions." This helps the community to evaluate not only whether a question has been asked before, but also whether it was properly answered. I think we need more of that and more benefactors that offer their rep to get good answers update after a while. It would be a nice gesture of +20k users to give away almost a small amount of daily rep for the sake of the site.
