<p>I personally do not see the <strong><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fail-fast" rel="nofollow">fail-fast</a></strong> policy that we implicitly adopted as something bad <em>per se</em>. I think that the problem lies in slow re-opening. </p>

<p>Often when I see off-topic-like questions (e.g., too broad, programming focused) I comment on them asking OP's for clarification and at the same time vote to close them. I do so because - from my experience - in the vast majority of cases either the OP responds or edits the question immediately (which leads me to retracting the vote), or he/she does not respond at all. The problem is when the question was edited, so that it is no longer unclear, or software-focused, but it still does not get re-opened because it did not receive enough votes. In my opinion the <strong>problem lies in us focusing more on closing than on re-opening questions</strong>.</p>

<p>We do not gain anything by leaving the off-topic questions opened. In most cases off-topic questions lead to off-topic answers, unclear questions lead to unclear answers, and low-quality questions lead to low-quality answers. In many cases such questions get one or two random upvotes and sometimes even get answered what makes them part of our large collection of low-quality questions. When such questions stay on the site they clutter the search results, which in effect leads to more duplicated questions since people do not find relevant search results among hundreds of off-topic questions.</p>

<p>I think <strong>we should close off-topic questions fast, but re-open them even faster</strong> if they got edited.</p>
