I seem to get 10 points per question upvote on Music.SE, I'm sure the norm is 5 on other SE sites like stackoverflow. Is this a customisation for the site or because it's in beta, or perhaps something else?
Stack Overflow has the luxury problem of too much input.
We, and most SE's, do not.
Still there's very high standards applied, and people want to shoot down questions, for some reason.
The low quality stuff should be pruned, no doubt about it. But where there is some doubt, in almost all cases we'd be better off keeping it open. In my mind.
The bad stuff quickly gets identified and shot down, so that's not a problem.
We need to have a scope though and this falls outside it. We could just allow any question that is asked on our site if growth is all we should care about.
Because when the Music Fan SE comes up, we need to know what belongs here and what belongs there. Also this the rules in the FAQ are based on the problem questions that were seen in the first few months of the beta.
Listen I understand what you are saying, but being welcoming to new users is different then bending the scope for them. We have currently no stage design questions and I don't think were going to get many more.
I guess it boils down to that my mindset is that I'd rather have some dubious questions in order to keep the good borderline ones, or the ones that started poor but became great generators of knowledge. The same applies to the outer limits of the scope.
Also, if Music Fans comes alive, we can migrate questions there.
Now we send people away with no place to go.
Still, I don't want pure fan questions here anyhow.
It's just a slight adjustment towards letting stuff slide I would like to see.
I regularly vote to close a question with no votes if I feel it is borderline just so more of the community can think about the question in depth. If I see a borderline question in the queue I will typically leave it open or skip.
Today, a question I answered on StackOverflow in July 2013 - which at the time was completely ignored by the OP, was upvoted and accepted! That's one hell of a slow development process!