It's about the Content

When I read the About Page, three things stand out to me:

We're working together to build a library of detailed answers to every question about programming. Questions that need improvement may be closed until someone fixes them. Remember: we're all here to learn, so be friendly and helpful!

The focus is on the content, and the content improves through community effort in improving it, and teaching people the ropes so they can contribute too.

That is why this reason was removed in the first place, it didn't help accomplish those goals that we put front and center:

It pains me when I hear people say that our sites are unfriendly, or that we chase new users away. But it’s a hard problem, because our highest priority has always been the quality of content on our sites. And it still is. We can’t lower our standards. We won’t. But we have been working hard to make our sites more welcoming, reminding users that feedback can be clear and nice, and helping new users learn the ropes before they get frustrated. And, as of today, we’ve completely overhauled closing.

How Will This Help Content?

So let's say we do implement this as a close reason again in some form and that everyone who has close vote privileges use the close reason in the exact same objective way -- what are we accomplishing? Will providing this message to users give them something actionable to improve the quality of content?

So that's it. I'm just not pro/enthusiastic enough to post my question on Stack Overflow. This is a deficiency in me as a human being, and there is simply no way to fix that. Not trying to pick on Raedwald here (he did answer the question as-asked), but this isn't going to accomplish the goals in the about page. Denying content for reasons that cannot be corrected may prevent bad content, but it certainly won't help introduce good content, it won't improve existing content, and it won't teach users how to distinguish between the two.

The message is being used to punish. And that's not very nice. Nor is it very useful in achieving our goals. And that's why it was removed.

Instead of a special punitive close reason, just downvote it. The helpful hover over the question downvote button says, "This question does not show any research effort; it is unclear or not useful". That's a single click. It is what downvotes were designed for. It will hide the question out of sight and out of mind. And that's good. If the user cares they will try to figure out how to improve it. They will try to figure out the problem themselves and edit their question, or put more thought in to their next one. And that's good for site quality and achieving our goals.

Having a separate close reason solely for you to punish users who don't meet your quality criteria may be cathartic, but it isn't very practical. Most of us started off with some questionable quality questions. While I'm sure Benjamin is a stellar coder, there is little doubt that his third question could very well have been closed with this reason. Fortunately for all of us having this discussion, it was just downvoted, and we have a tremendous contributor with us because he took that reception as a reason to learn, improve, and contribute more quality content, not walk away angry at the SO community.

Question quality is an issue. That's what was discussed on the last podcast at length, but the solution isn't to ostracize and punish askers of a single poor question (which is what this close reason would do), it's to improve the system to minimize their impact (especially the frustration they cause), without being mean or assuming they are the problem rather than their content.