Why is it that new users to Movies & TV Stack Exchange (like me) are unable to ask good questions?

Question

I am looking at the 15 newest questions. Out of the 15, only 7 have at least one upvote and are still open. This is <50% of all new questions. There are 6 questions asked by users with 150 reputation or less. Only 1 has at least one upvote and is still open. In other words, a stunning 83.3% of all questions by new users are bad questions! I am using 150 reputation as a cut-off because the association bonus grants 100 reputation.

Why is it that new users to Movies & TV Stack Exchange (like me) are unable to ask good questions?

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The 15 questions:

Should the Infinity Stones be returned to their original time and space locations

How are they captured?

How do Transformers die? (mine)

What kind of music plays in The Meet The Creator scenes?

Is the film Yesterday (2019) a remake of Jean-Philippe (2006)?

When to take intermission during Avengers: Endgame?

Is Marcus Tremaine based on Cinderella's father from any of the movies?

Why did energy level drop after switching to global automatic control?

Why did Brumby want to kill Ritchie?

Why doesn't Mexico take Gilead refugees?

Is there a real-world basis for this interrogation technique?

Why is Skinner so awkward in Hot Fuzz?

What's the reason for the decade jump in the recent X-Men trilogy?

If the flerken ate the tesseract then why did it not get powers?

Would Thanos still get the Stone?

Answer 1

This is going to be an answer based more on personal experience and opinion than anything else.

The majority of low-quality questions and answers - not just here, but on every StackExchange site - come from 1-rep users who visit exactly once and then vanish. They don't know or care about our quality standards, on-topic guidelines, or the fact we're not a discussion platform, they just want to put their two cents in. Ever since we banned ID questions, for example, the only ones we've received have been from 1-rep users.

I'll emphasise that you are not in this category. You took the time to improve your question, which I've voted to re-open, and are now taking the time to investigate this phenomenon you noticed. One failed attempt, which you've now fixed, does not IMO make you "unable to ask a good question". It just means you're learning. I personally hope you'll stick around and become a valued member of the StackExchange community.

That's not to say that all bad questions and answers come from 1-rep users, or that 1-rep users always post bad questions and answers. It's an unfortunate trend rather than a hard-and-fast rule. I've seen some excellent questions from people who, unfortunately, never bothered checking back in to look at the answers (Workplace.SE is especially bad for that sort of thing). Conversely, I've seen one guy with five-digit rep on multiple stacks sign up at Politics.SE and rack up so many downvotes for his terrible, opinionated "answers" that he lost his entire association bonus (he's now at about 60 or so).

I'm not allowed to name names on Meta, so I'll just add that one of those "new" users is notorious on other stacks for posting a torrent of low-quality answers. He's an outlier and should probably be ignored, not that it changes your statistics much.

Answer 2

I am looking at the 15 newest questions. .... In other words, a stunning 83.3% of all questions by new users are bad questions!

Unfortunately, your sample is flawed/biased but understandably so.

The newest questions aren't really a good measure of quality because questions take time to mature and be voted on by the community. Give those same questions a couple of days and check the results.

Now I'm not going to argue that there weren't some real stinkers in there and the questions with the most amount of downvotes have, arguably, been correctly treated.

Downvotes are a community judgement on, primarily, how much prior research has been done and the usefulness of the question.

I think you will find that the most "disliked" questions in your bunch lacked sufficient research (or were based on a complete misunderstanding) or aren't particularly useful to the community (but opinions on some differ).

Equally, we have an enthusiastic core of members who are here a lot and take our community moderation seriously. We recognise duplicate questions (a research issue), stuff that doesn't fit our format (bathroom breaks!) or is just plain off-topic. Those get downvoted/close-voted (sometimes not enough of both) so that the site's bots can clean them up in due course.

I also applaud your attempts to improve your question(s). Frankly I voted to leave the Transformers one open and re-open it once it was closed.

Sometimes the answer to a question is "We don't know" or "The movies aren't consistent" and should be answered on that basis.

That doesn't make the question invalid/bad/unworthy even if, in our heads, we're thinking "well that's obvious".