In those situations, the praise is the reward.
In a Q&A site, the reward of praise motivates some… while others are only motivated by getting an answer to their questions.
The different motivations distorts the value of gamification.
If the only thing that motivates uses is points, then praise alone can work. If getting an answer is more important than points, then the praise alone fails for some and adds friction for others who try to motivate using praise and not seeing any results.
The problem here is that users (even brand new users posting crap) aren’t all the same. Some are engaged (in their own minds) with a community and respond better to praise and kindly correction. Other act from a purely transactional view in which they want (and often expect) something valuable for as little effort as possible.
Any approach to handling poor submissions constructed with only one group of users in mind is broken in some way. As an aside, I tend to agree with @Olin that of the two ways to make this mistake only one reliably leads to a site with high levels of expert participation.
But I’d rather see a system that leads in kindly and forgiving and then tends (pretty quickly) to a harder insistence on seeing some improvement. Alas, that’s complicated and it will be hard to build a consensus for (and harder still to keep it as you on-board larger groups of users). It also requires users to have a efficient way to judge where along the timeline a newish user is. Tricky.
That’s true, but that’s a completely different environment. In school, the teachers are socializing eye to eye several hours per day with the same persons.
Imagine if the police walked around praising people not committing crimes…
Besides, the schools purpose is teaching so proper pedagogic is paramount. A QA-site does not have the same purpose. The goal is to gather good questions so that everybody who wonders the same thing as you did won’t have to ask a question. It’s not about teaching the specific person who asks the question.
Is the argument here that leaving questions in a poor state, grammer/tag/slightly off topic is better than fixing them so that future viewers see high quality questions as examples of how they should ask?
Is this question,
https://outdoors.stackexchange.com/questions/17213/how-can-i-attach-a-patch-to-a-nylon-backpack
better off having its title capitalization fixed so that future viewers see a correctly written title or is the argument that it should have been left improperly capitalized?
Obviously I graduated from preschool now – but still where I live I hardly never ever see a policeman and literally never talk with one (except passport control), so I don’t understand why you’re talking about police walking around, whether praising people or otherwise.
Also as moderator it is not my job to punish (but it might be my job to keep users from “taking the law into their own hands” i.e. giving themselves permission to punish other users).
Just to prove a point. In some situations (like law enforcement) praising is not the best way. In others (like school and raising children i general) it most often is.
My point is, how are you going to make people write questions according to the rules with just praising? They don’t even know what they should do different. Children in preschool does lots of things every minute, and just by chance they will do some things that gives them praising from time to time. That’s definitely not the case for someone who is posting two questions a year on a forum.
Praising can be useful after you have told them what was wrong and they have corrected it.
Also, “punishment” sounds a bit harsh. It’s not that I’m advocating “Fix your f*****g post or I’ll ban you”, but I cannot really see what’s wrong in pointing out that they have not followed the rules for whatever reason. If someone posts a question with code that is not enough to reproduce the problem (aka a MRE) are you then going to praise them for good indentation and hope that will fix it? I’m not trying to be snarky or anything. I just don’t understand how the parallel to preschool should translate to a QA-forum. Especially since children tend to really seek praising from adults. People asking questions on a QA do not seek praise. They seek answers.
Another difference is that when it comes to teachers, it is their job to teach. It’s also their job to make the children feel good and help them with whatever problem they have. They have a completely different role compared to people who voluntarily answer technical questions on an internet forum.
If a question gets closed because a user have not read the rules for whatever reason, I really cannot see the big harm in that. And if they get offended and never comes back because someone writes “This question is a bit hard to understand. Please state what the expected and actual output is, as you can read here: <link to rules>” well, tbh, I think that’s a user we’re better of without.
No, those are clearly not the only choices.
Then what are the other choices?
The post which I was replying to was this:
If the OP doesn’t know the rules then I might be inclined to delete that line myself, for them – helpful and the easiest thing to do – closing the question when an obvious trivial edit could save it seems like it might be intentionally punitive.
That’s right. 
And so they might – but apparently some seek to close a question in the least helpful way possible, perhaps (to my surprise) explicitly trying to shame other users who try to edit a poor question to improve it, and referring to the question with a vulgar word which implies it’s nothing but an unsavoury heap of parrot droppings – which I was surprised the site moderators permit, but hey.
I don’t think the role is completely different – and I think that the “afflictive emotions” are a hindrance whether they’re in a classroom or on a Q&A site.
I also think the community should summarise its expectations of a question – in at least two formats i.e. briefly (in bullet-point form) and at greater length/depth.
And that the software should do a more thorough job than SE does of getting the community-authored guidelines in front of new users before and when they ask a question, see e.g. here.
Yes, and I have done such edits myself. However, I don’t think that there’s necessarily anything wrong with closing it and letting them handle the edit themselves. Without any fact to back it up, I do believe that most people who would leave and never come back for such things are the same persons that would never bother to learn the rules anyway. And I have seen several examples where helpful users have fixed the indentation for the same user for multiple questions in a row.
It’s a balance act. Those users who complain about the “helpful” users do often believe that the helpful users who fixes things in an instant actually causes harm on the whole. That they make the whole QA worse for helping a single person. And can you with absolute certainty say that they are wrong?
Also, many times it’s out of pure frustration when you are actually spending time to explain in a nice way how and why the post should be edited, and then some dogooder spoils everything. Yes, I’m exaggerating a little bit, but I guess you can see my point. We should show respect for users feelings, but that includes all users. Newbees who asks questions, dogooders who fixes posts and those who try to teach newbees by telling them how to edit. I don’t think it’s fair to always blame one of these.
I’d say that the difference is huge. When I teach (which I often to professionally) I approach it in a completely different way. Sure, there are similarities, but then again, there are also similarities with being a police.
I especially tend to do those quick fixes for others when it comes to things that are less important. Like removing “Thanks in advance” and fixing spelling errors. Especially if I notice that the person in question is not very good at English. Then I do what I can to help them.
But things like fixing proper indentation is something that you should learn imho. If you have posted three questions with unindented code, then there’s something wrong. Same thing if you repeatedly post questions without MRE + actual and expected behavior. Or if you post pictures of code or post links that has to be read to understand the question. Those are things that needs to be dealt with so that people learn.
What would you have done as a moderator in that situation?
To close the question, and make the OP fix the mess before they get the desired result.
There’s stuff about “that situation” I don’t know, haven’t investigated, so who am I to comment.
On SE I would like to do as little as possible (acting as a moderator, reproving rude users, is tedious; fortunately the large majority of users don’t require my moderation, in my experience, i.e. they’re moderate already).
Initially on SE I’d post a comment to @ the user. My comment would reference some specific sentence[s] of the Help or FAQs or CoC which they seemed to be ignoring when they posted their comment.
If it happened again, after I tried that once or twice, I’d begin to delete those offending comments without further comment.
If it still continued then I’d send a mod message, quoting the actual latest comments of theirs which I found unacceptable, and quoting the Help/FAQs/CoC again.
The next mod message after that should come with an timed suspension of their account (then escalate if still necessary).
I am inclined to agree with Monica’s dicta here.
This question seems super important, but there is way too much to read here.
Has a consensus been reached?
Is there a summary of these 200+ comments somewhere?
Yep: @cellio posted A vision for Codidact, which sums up this thread.