Should you not give feedback if you vote to close a question to help the questioner better use this website? [duplicate]

Question

My question has been closed again.

DavidZ has pointed out that it is acceptable for people to not give reasons for closing questions. I understand that the site does not require them to do that. However, if you care about the integrity of this website and genuinely want to help out users, should you not give them honest feedback about their questions? I explicitly asked for reasons when my question was on hold and I got no response.

Since I don't know what is wrong with my question, I am now unsure about properly formulating questions for this website. Don't these people realize that they are hurting the website's reliability and integrity by their actions?

Answer 1

Nothing is wrong with your question, but the site has a superhard policy against homework tasks. It is applied so strictly, that even a lot of questions obviously not being homework problems are closed on this reason.

In the current state of your question, there is not too much to do, because the majority of the voters doesn't want it.

However, the homework close reason says this:

"Homework-like questions should ask about a specific physics concept and show some effort to work through the problem."

So, re-formulate it to ask about a specific physics concept, and show some effort.

The funny thing is: probably your question will be still closed or left closed. What I would do: Make clear, that you have both, best if you insert a short excerpt of both in the beginning of the post.² So:

• Specific physics concept: I see a contradiction here, on Newton II law the force on the chair should be [..]
• My effort: As we can see it in the second half of the post, ...

[and here is your question]

It is very likely, that your question will be still closed. But, on this way, you will have already enough ammunition to start this meta discussion.

You will get many critics, questions and suggestions in the comments. Do everything what they say, even if they seem irrelevant or hairsplitting for you, it helps a lot in their voting¹. This is your only defense against negative votes: react comments quickly, and do it with quick and convincing comments and edits.

If someone explains the reason of the negative vote (down or close) to your post, honor it: nothing makes it obligatory to give a reason for a vote.

Unfortunately, following all of these makes asking a homework question actually harder than solving it for yourself.

The community consent is very strongly against numerical problems here, there is only an admittedly very narrow "escape path" from this, which is mainly closed despite that it is communicated as if it would be open.

Your current question is already closed, and getting the 3 reopen votes is possible, but unlikely.

¹ _{My heuristic (unproovable, but for me realistic) estimation is that for every comment, there are around 2-3 people, who doesn't comment, only votes. And there are around 10 people, who doesn't even vote, but thinks the same. Any time if you get a comment to your post, imagine average 2-3 people who votes the same and 10 other who thinks the same. And voters typically don't come back to reconsider their vote, this is why you need to react quickly.}

² _{The first sentences create a general impression in the reviewers (and any readers), what is your post about. The rest will be interpreted already in this frame. Thus, your first sentences are super-important.}

Answer 2

One way to make a question more conceptual is to see if you can phrase it without numbers. You can always include numbers at the end as examples to give greater materiality to the question, but in general an issue I find in questions with specific numbers is that makes questions overly specific and thus not terribly useful for anyone except the person asking the specific question. BTW it is IMO likely that, if you can clearly write a question without resorting to numerical values, it will be conceptual rather than overly specific.

To be fully honest, a problem I have with your specific question is that it does look like an assignment question as phrased. I am personally mostly opposed to people answering specific assignment questions on behalf of an OP, and I will do my best to discourage people from posting overly specific assignment question. While I don’t have problems in supplying conceptual explanations, i.e. supplying information for someone to complete the question by herself/himself, I cannot abide by people who post with the hopes that someone else will provide a complete solution for them. Thus, for starters I would suggest having a man of mass $m_1$, a chair of mass $m_2$ and a force of $f$ Newtons (the force, BTW, does not have unit of mass so your $100$lbs doesn’t make sense there, and the weight is also measured in Newton, not in lbs there’s a problem there unless you’re using lbs as a unit of force rather than Newtons, and that would be untoward). I’m not sure converting to variables-only is enough to do the trick, but at least it’s a start.

Mostly the problem with your question is that it’s more or less similar to too many found in textbooks and discussed on multiple websites. Maybe you would do well to search for similar questions and then include as part of your question the contrast between various solutions or paths to solutions, showing you have done some effort and focusing on what part of one or many proposed solutions are still unclear after you have studied these solutions.

Finally, if I cared to comment on every single question I vote-to-close, I would likely have to reply to equally many comments and wouldn’t have time to get anything else done.

I suppose these are my reasons as to why I don’t comment and vote-to-close a lot.