To be honest, the "apparent attitude" post you linked to lays it all out pretty well, so I don't know what I could add to that.

And shouldn't we at least be willing to make exceptions based on things like

No. None of those things.

Stack Overflow is supposed to be a system that builds a searchable database of knowledge. The platform structures that database in terms of questions and answers. The idea is that if you have a programming problem, you search for a solution. If you did your diligence in searching for a solution but couldn't find one (note: throwing your code into a search engine doesn't count), then the platform has failed, you ask a question, and the platform will succeed for the next person with that problem. That's the ideal.

To this end, all of the things you list are irrelevant. Who is asking, their level of expertise, the motivation of the asker, none of that matters. In the ideal case, Stack Overflow should be a system where who is asking or answering is immaterial. We care about information, not the people in question. The goal isn't to help the person asking the question; it's to help the next person with that same question.

Furthermore, ideally we try to optimize for pearls, not sand. What that aphorism means is that it's OK to lose a few good questions here and there if it means having fewer bad ones. So being strict is preferred over being lax. Why?

Because the time of experts who answer questions is incredibly valuable.

Stack Overflow was initially conceived as a way to keep experts engaged without running into the Help Vampire problem that exhausts such people. Having strictly enforced rules about questions helps, as it makes it easier for people with actual knowledge to be connected to questions that engage that knowledge. Shutting down poor quality questions quickly reduces the burden on experts, as they don't have to sift through as much garbage to find something that's interesting.

Now all of this represents the ideal state. Nothing about SO at present is "ideal". The platform has suffered substantial brain drain over the last few years. There are a variety of reasons for this, but lower question quality on many important tags is a substantial part of that.

So suggesting that we should encourage even lower question quality by just answering everything or leaving it for others to answer is... unhelpful.

TL;DR Because lowering the bar for question quality for the most part doesn't actually help the people you are suggesting it would help.

I took a minute before answering this to ponder when I'm willing to overlook a few hiccups in question quality and I came up with two, neither of which you mentioned:

1. Somebody is clearly not a programmer, and explicitly states that they aren't trying to be one, but have an immediate one-off software problem they are trying to solve and don't have the money to pay a real programmer to solve it for them. They just need help, and they probably won't ever even log in to SO again.
2. Somebody is an experienced Stack Overflow user tripping over a misfeature in a tech stack they aren't used to. Some poor 10k rep Java programmer gets tasked with doing some web frontend work and immediately runs into the morass that is JavaScript module systems, which they would never have expected because seriously, what programming language screws up module systems? Despite the numerous Q&As already present on the site, it can take more than a little googling to fix module mismatch problems without the help of somebody already well versed in the nuances. Don't get too hung up on the specific examples, every tech stack has at least some sharp corners.

What do these have in common?

We're not trying to teach these people how to be programmers.

The first one isn't going to learn and doesn't want to, the second already knows and just hit something counterintuitive enough that not even their usual Google-fu will easily suffice.

For everybody else, while the question quality rules might make solving their immediate problems less efficient, it is more efficient for teaching them how to solve their own problems, and this is by far the most valuable service we could possibly provide them (it's also more efficient use of the valuable time of oversubscribed experts as Nicol Bolas' answer correctly points out).

Consider the MRE. Why do we insist on a minimal reproduction case? Because it makes debugging more efficient? Well, I mean, it does, but part of the reason is that at least half the time the user will either solve their own problem in the course of creating one or realize the minimal example doesn't reproduce the issue and now they have a place to start looking for the problem on their own. Sure, it helps us debug more efficiently, but more importantly it starts teaching the user how to tackle their own problems.

Why do we insist that people search before posting? Because it cuts down on noise? Well, yes it does, but it also gets people in the habit of at least googling their error message before posting yet another question about file permissions or whatever.

I think a lot of people miss (or perhaps undervalue) the pedagogical aspect of the question quality rules, teach a person to fish and whatnot.

I know, I know I'm old

Although I've only been a professional programmer for ~10 years, I've been a Linux user off-and-on for 25 and I built my first PC around 1993. I definitely grew up as a technologist with the old school early Internet hacker ethos with the ESR school of what constitutes a good question. I realize this is now incredibly passé. Millennials and Gen Z are in general much more collaborative and less individualistic, and in many ways that's a good thing. So they are quicker to reach out to others for help at early roadblocks. It isn't necessarily wrong or right, it's just a different way to be. And that's fine, as far as it goes.

But I can't help but feel those folks have thrown the baby out with the bathwater and missed out on some very real advantages of that rugged individualist paradigm, and based on this neverending debate about the purpose of Stack Overflow I don't think I'm the only one. And one of the problems that one encounters trying to sail upwind of the zeitgeist is that pushing back against even part of the prevailing paradigm comes off (possibly even in your own head) as rejecting it utterly: sides are taken, lines are drawn, and we all entrench for battle.

It doesn't have to be this way

It probably will, people being what they are and I'm certainly as human as anybody else. But the Internet is a big place, and there's plenty of space to have a site for people with the rugged individualism of a Randian protagonist as well as a site for people who want a more collaborative and interactive experience. Do we really need to turn Stack Overflow into a bad clone of r/learnprogramming? If you are tempted to answer yes, consider the question in reverse: why would we want to turn r/learnprogramming into a bad clone of Stack Overflow?

The Internet is big enough to cater to a lot of different tastes and use cases. Maybe we should act like it, instead of insisting on the One True Way of human interaction online?

Consider your options

First off: if you can see yourself in the character I assumed for this question, let me take a moment to thank you. As an expert in one or more languages, libraries etc. who is capable of answering these questions, your time is valuable. If you choose to spend some of this time trying to "help beginners", the world will likely be a better place for it.

That said, there are many possible approaches to that goal. Here's a probably-non-exhaustive list:

• Contributing to documentation for an open-source project¹

• Writing guides and tutorials on a personal blog - or on a suitable platform that accepts free-form guides and tutorials on the topic²

• Building up a following on social media, then directing beginners to excellent existing information (whether or not your own)

• Noticing a common pattern in the mistakes beginners make, hammering your advice into Q&A form by creating your own high-quality framing question, and posting it self-answered on a Q&A site (such as Stack Overflow)

• Finding well-asked (properly focused, clearly stated, appropriately detailed, unique) questions from beginners on a Q&A site and answering them

• Editing existing questions to improve them - by stating ideas more clearly, removing noise to save the reader's time, fixing up code examples (where possible) to focus on the specific part relevant to the problem, etc.

• Reading a discussion forum and replying to beginners who start threads looking for help with an issue - diagnosing the problem for them from a code dump, possibly discussing back and forth to get needed information, asking probing questions to figure out what the beginner already knows, etc.

But what does not work is to mix and match strategy and medium. You would not, I assume, try to fit an answer to a programming problem into a typical social media posting (especially if Markdown etc. is not supported); you would probably not try to offer detailed "support" for your personal blog tutorial in the comments section; you would almost certainly not edit the OP of a discussion forum thread to remove greetings and thank-yous, even if you were a moderator and had the power to do so.

Similarly, you should not "help" beginners with an issue masquerading as a proper question on a Q&A site such as Stack Overflow. Aside from the fact that many such posts are not actually questions at all, they don't meet the site's standards.

With that in mind, let's consider the purpose of these standards.

"Not a discussion forum"

In the above list, I clearly delineated "Q&A site" as a separate category from "discussion forum". Stack Exchange sites, such as Stack Overflow, belong in the former category.

A Q&A site is a fundamentally different medium from a discussion forum, so it has different rules, policies, guidelines and standards. These, in turn, exist because a Q&A site serves a fundamentally different purpose, aiming at a fundamentally different goal.

In the case of Stack Overflow, this goal is summarized in the tour (emphasis mine, original emphasis removed):

With your help, we're working together to build a library.... This site is all about getting answers. It's not a discussion forum. There's no chit-chat.... Not all questions work well in our format. Avoid questions that are... likely to generate discussion rather than answers.... Our goal is to have the best answers to every question...

As I've said on Meta before, libraries contain novels, not diaries. To extend the analogy: books in a library are organized into chapters, which are a sequence of paragraphs that present coherent ideas; the books then have compelling and useful titles, and are arranged according to the Dewey decimal system. Analogously: in order for a Q&A site to collect "the best answers" properly, it must:

• Exclude whatever is out of scope or subjective, to ensure that the answers can be objectively judged in and of themselves, and so that everyone knows which site to find them on (so we close questions that are not about programming, primarily opinion-based, or which seek outside resources);

• Make answers identifiable, by putting them underneath a framing question that sets clear expectations and allows readers to confirm that they actually have found what they're looking for (so we close questions that are unclear or not written in English) and that they have the same problem (so we close questions that are missing debugging details);

• Organize answers properly by putting answers to the same question together (so we close duplicates, to avoid getting answers in a separate place) and not putting answers to different questions together (so we close questions that are not properly focused);

• Ensure that answers will be useful to others - both by the above organization and presentation practices, and by making sure that the question points at an actual, identifiable conceptual difficulty that could be shared by others rather than an idiosyncratic failure to reason about the problem properly or check for a simple blunder (so we close questions motivated by a typo or by a result that isn't reproducible).

By doing these things, the resulting Q&A collection becomes vastly easier to search (because search results don't get cluttered with irrelevant things, and because the necessary information doesn't get stuck to an unclear question), and therefore more useful. As a result, everyone (not just people who try asking the question themselves) can get a fast, high quality answer - which is necessarily at the expense of personalization.³ Even when someone does manage to find "the right question" despite it being poorly asked, low question quality can have other harmful effects, and even spectacularly written answers often cannot salvage this.

Keep in mind that closing questions as described above is injunctive, not punitive. The point is to come to an immediate agreement not to answer the question until it is fixed, assuming it is fixable. Deletion is only for questions that are fundamentally not fixable. But immediate closure is vital to the proper operation of the site.

The topic (programming) on Stack Overflow is quite technical, of course, and this does impose some additional requirements in some cases - for example, the expectation of a minimal reproducible example to showcase a specific problem, or a clear, precise and unambiguous specification for a how-to question. However, the question standards really are mostly not specific to Stack Overflow, but rather things that should be expected on any Q&A site.

But what about...

Hopefully it's clear by now: A Q&A site is about the questions and answers, not the people asking and answering them. While of course we aim to be kind and courteous, when a Q&A site achieves a real sense of community, it's not because of having experts on call to help out with individual, emergent issues (like on a discussion forum). Instead, a functional Q&A site community is on the same page, working towards the common goal of building a useful Q&A reference.

As such, it does not matter whether a poorly asked question comes from an absolute beginner (to a programming language, to Stack Overflow, or both) or a 15-year veteran. Nor does the urgency or magnitude of the OP's plight.

Of course, it commonly happens that there's some issue that a lot of beginners encounter, and none of them are properly equipped to ask a good question about it - perhaps because of unknown unknowns, or because the issue is so fundamental that people encountering it have usually not yet learned proper terminology. That's why the option of posting a self-answered question exists. The best way for you to help is to pose the question properly, give your answer, and then help close duplicates. This way actually helps other beginners who have the question, instead of just an arbitrarily selected one who asked.

But if the question is common because it's something you recognize as an "interview question", consider what you're really accomplishing this way. If there's an interesting, underlying conceptual issue, please make the question about that issue instead. It's not actually very productive to "help" people get jobs by making them able to answer a question that was specifically intended to filter them out - because they'll be lacking understanding in other related areas necessary for the job, and then the company will have to deal with that.

_{¹Especially one that has committed or is trying to shift to a diátaxis model (this could range anywhere from a tiny utility, to an entire programming language).}

_{²This could include Q&A sites: the old Stack Overflow Documentation project was sort of like this, and the Codidact software supports an "article" post type - although the Software site currently doesn't use it.}

_{³Again: we deal in novels, not diaries. In my opinion, this is actually why you don't get fast, high quality answers on a discussion forum: because they're personalized.}

Stack Overflow isn't a generic help site, nor is it trying to be all things to all people. In many ways, it's the Q&A equivalent of Wikipedia (or, for those over 30, an encyclopedia such as World Book or Encyclopedia Britannica). That being said, we need to have high quality standards for the exact same reason that Wikipedia does. You wouldn't want Wikipedia to be cluttered with articles about typos, lacking in context, etc. - you want articles to contain generally-applicable information.

It seems like trying to ask about this usually just gets canned responses like "Stack Overflow is not a discussion forum". I assume this is intended to have deeper implications, but they aren't immediately clear.

True on both counts.

1. This is intended to have deeper implications.
2. They aren't immediately clear.

Jeff Atwood lends some clarity in blog posts, some of which are linked in previous answers. In particular, his 10-year-anniversary post includes illuminating reminders.

• Stack Overflow is a wiki first

Stack Overflow ultimately has much more in common with Wikipedia than a discussion forum. By this I mean questions and answers on Stack Overflow are not primarily judged by their usefulness to a specific individual, but by how many other programmers that question or answer can potentially help over time. I tried as hard as I could to emphasize this relationship from launch day in 2008.

• Stack Overflow is designed for practicing programmers

People who either already have a job as a programmer, or could potentially be hired as a programmer today if they wanted to be.
...
Yes, in case you're wondering, part of this was an overt business decision.
...
Stack Overflow was definitely designed as a fairly strict system of peer review, which is great for already practicing professionals, but pretty much everything you would not want as a student or beginner.

This design frustrates novices, because SO is the wrong venue for their questions. It frustrates would-be mentors, because SO is the wrong venue for their answers.

Why is the target audience not communicated more clearly? As Atwood puts it,

The responsibility for this misunderstanding is all on Stack Overflow.

A perhaps dissenting perspective here...

Why should I help close "bad" questions that I think are valid

You shouldn't.

You should either downvote or edit it instead.

If you think the question is valid within the constraints of the site and useful then it probably has the following qualities:

• It's likely an on-topic question (even if it's esoteric or basic)
• If it has content problems, it's probably salvagable.
• It may be subtly different in important ways from what seems to be an immediate duplicate.

If you believe it's a valid question which may have problems, you can edit the question to improve it instead of closing it.

This is something I think about a lot. I believe there's a fundamental (and serious, and potentially quite debilitating) contradiction between two ideals:

1. What Stack Overflow is supposed to be: a curated repository of excellent answers to excellent questions.
2. A Q/A site where people can ask questions and get help from real experts.

The thing is that if you fully embrace #1, helping questioners is not the primary goal. Questioners are fodder; their job is to ask questions (good questions) that motivate answerers to write good answers. But if a questioner gets no help (because their question was not good, or not new, or whatever), that's totally not a problem, because helping them wasn't the goal in the first place.

Personally, I believe that #1, though it sounds noble and was certainly responsible for SO's early success, is a dead end. Most if not all of the good questions have been answered. No one should be asking new questions; they should be finding their answer (and their question!) on the site already.

But if there are no new questions, there are no new answers to write, either.

So what happens is that you have a bunch of expert answerers hungrily waiting for nice, new questions to answer (hopefully in the scintillatingly definitive manner of yore), and then getting angry at the newbies for just asking a bunch of questions that are already answered.

I think most visitors these days (and certainly most questioners) assume that #2 is the acting definition. But of course there's still a core mass of old-timers who are still doggedly trying to uphold #1. Thus, the interminable battles, and meta-questions like Karl's.

Personally, I think that the "curated repository of definitive answers" mantra should be respectfully retired. I think SO could be successful today if it openly welcomed all questions, with no stigma about asking a question that might already have been answered, or that the questioner "ought to have been able to answer by doing basic research". We would see that most of the real-time answers were gentle redirects to existing answers, perhaps with a bit of commentary tailored to specifics of the "new" (but really not-new) question. (And we would have to keep finding ways to discourage and filter out the truly unacceptably lazy questions by people who just want us to do their work for them.)

Now, I am certainly not actually proposing to retire the "curated repository" mantra, because I know that would never fly. But I therefore expect the tension and the contradictions to continue.