<p>I guess, or hope, we all agree that it is better to be nice not nasty and that we want users to feel welcome rather than the opposite. Existing policy already allows detailed and friendly comment from those with time and inclination to give it. I often try to elicit better or more precise questions through comments, with mixed success.</p>
<p>It's encouraging that really rude or offensive comments almost never appear on CV and are edited out swiftly if they do. (The rudest comments I've seen have been directed <em>at</em> moderators or long-term supporters.) The standard of civility and helpfulness here vastly exceeds what can be seen e.g. on Twitter, let alone worse places, and I don't think we should beat ourselves up as being unfriendly.</p>
<p>But there are other statements of equal importance here.</p>
<p>Cross Validated specifically and Stack Exchange (SE) generally do not offer help lines. <strong>On SE there is no entitlement to an answer. People must ask a good question first, and even then no-one is obliged to answer.</strong> I consider that CV is a good thing and would not be active here otherwise, but a problem for CV -- for new users and experienced users alike -- is that many threads are of very limited value. There are many reasons for this, but in total it is why <strong>people should maintain, if not strengthen, the existing barriers whereby, given sufficient reputation, you can vote to close, or downvote, or explain why a question is not yet a good question, in your view</strong>.</p>
<p>SE is well documented. I consider that <strong>new users who are disappointed are partly to blame for their disappointment if they don't read around to discover expectations or limitations which imply why their question hasn't been accepted</strong>. It's not really a good use of anyone's time to write out specific messages explaining why (for example) a software-specific question is off-topic here -- or a request for advice on how to analyse someone's data is impossible to answer well without much more detail on their goals and indeed their data. I have done my share of that, but I don't feel personal or collective obligation to do much more.</p>
<p>As often pointed out, statistics is a field where many people briefly have an obligation to study or apply statistics, but they do not have a long-term incentive or goal to put much more effort into learning it thoroughly.  That is often fine but it also leads to many of the more naive posts which boil down to requests to do the posters' thinking for them.</p>
