As a sequel to my earlier question Changing how we handle low-effort and tutorial-on-demand questions, I'd like to ask some opinions on the current state of the site.
In my humble opinion, low-effort tutorial-on-demand questions are swamping the site. Personally, I am very much demotivated by these lazy and hastily written requests usually coming down to 'how do I make this effect in Program X'.
In response to the question linked above, there was a consensus to downvote and comment on questions like these. Seemed like a good idea at the time, but right now, I see a few problems.
- Most of these questions are posted by first-time users. Downvoting might not be the most welcoming action to a new user. That is regardless of whether these might be 'hit-and-run' requests (the user gets their answer and never returns to the site).
- There are lots of users, some of them of moderate to (very) high reputation, who insist on answering as much of these questions as possible, no matter how vague or badly worded they are. I understand the spirit of wanting to help people, but to me, it doesn't seem like a good idea to keep on enabling help vampires. As it has been formulated in chat recently, it is as if 'one parent forbids a kid from eating candy and the other keeps on giving said candy every day'.
- Downvotes are not enough an incentive to stop these kinds of questions. They still get asked, they still get answered, and people even still reap a lot of reputation from the answers.
What I want to know now is, again: do we want tutorial-on-demand questions on this site?