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Etiquette: Vote to close or vote down?

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    Having 3000 rep, I have two options when I don't like a question: I can vote to close it or I can vote it down. The incentive for me, bizarrely, is to vote to close. Quite apart from the margin reputation cost of voting down, when I vote to close then I'm measuring my opinion against the other high reputation people of MO - and I have a higher respect for these people's opinion than of Joe MOwer - so I can better measure how my opinions of MO match against the ideal standard. To be facetious for a second (who, me?), I'd rather measure my "MO impact factor" in milliSpeyers (about 491) than metaEuclids (page 53 in the user list, if you're wondering).

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    You meant megaEuclids, right? It's too early in the morning for me to try and guess what a metaEuclid could possibly be.
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    Andrew- You know those options aren't exclusive, right?

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    I vote to close only on things that are obviously inappropriate. Often, though, there are questions with few votes that are writtenly very poorly (either language or exposition) or about only marginally interesting material, and I'm happy to downvote these just as in indication to other that the question might not be worth taking the time to read.

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    I agree with Scott. If a question looks like it can be fixed, I downvote and/or leave a comment.
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    @Scott(s): it depends on how much fixing the question needs. If it needs some serious work before it's a decent question, it should be closed and reopened after it's been fixed. This prevents people from posting answers to what they speculate might be the question.

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    I was about to ask the same question as Andrew did above almost a year ago when I cleverly thought to use the search mechanism to see if it had already been asked (spoiler alert: it had).

    I'm bumping the thread to get a wider range of opinions and to see if community standards have evolved in the last year. I personally have almost entirely stopped downvoting -- I find it slightly hard to envision questions which I think are appropriate for the site but I want to discourage people from wasting their time on. In the not-so-common scenario that I come across a site-appropriate question whose English or LaTeX has been badly butchered, I usually find myself taking the time to try to edit the problems away.

    I do like Anton's suggestion -- I think votes to close with comments to the effect that the question can later be reopened if it gets fixed up should be more common.
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    I use downvotes almost exclusively as a way to keep my reputation a multiple of 10.

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    I downvote questions that are obviously going to be closed (spam, etc.) but which do not yet have any downvotes as a way of signaling other people to close it.

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