This PSQ is another case of the new Community comments not being expressive enough. The question is quite clear in what it’s asking.
I think the problem is that the “additional details” may be conflated with showing effort/context, but the second sentence about it being “hard to tell” what is being asked is not the case with many of these PSQs. It’s not uncommon that a low-effort question is precise, focused, and comprehensible; the issue is that it’s low-effort!
@amWhy 6 upvotes and 4 reopen-votes for a question that makes no sense whatsoever. That actually makes me angry. I hope that the thing with the "abuse of $f(x)$" was a joke. And of course, for a nonsenseical question , there cannot be a meaningful answer, but many users seem to ignore this.
@amWhy I hope that this "blog"-post soon vanishes. In fact, the question is also bad (as pointed out). Why invent new notations for such basic functions ? The score of this post (even if it is every old) speaks volumes about how wrong this site develops.
@LalitTolani You have suggested an action. Please do not ping particular users for this purpose , the suggestion itself is enough.
@shoteyes The user apparently prepared a comment to save time when he/she wants to post an explanation. But this is of course not sufficient. It has to be verified whether such a particular post makes sense in the concrete situation - here surely not. The user must prepare more such posts and more carefully choose the proper one.
@MartinR I wonder how many users here know what "A-level math" means (I do not). But even assuming one knows this , this is no really valuable context.
I think, in this case the best reason would be "too basic question", maybe this possibility should be added to the list of possible close-reasons. The general problem of such posts is that a reasonable context would basically be already the solution.
@Peter I don't think "too basic" should be a close reason - the site has always been for all levels of mathematics (the help center used to say this explicitly, although I cannot find it now).
This is a recent, massively upvoted PSQ with massively upvoted answers, but can be deleted.
@user1729 the weird thing is the “motivation” was added by the OP after being alerted by a comment. Then the OP removed it after the question became hot.
@user1729 I remember this formulation. But the problem is that basic questions rarely allow reasonable context which is always expected (also in basic questions).
@user1729 This is exactly my problem. If you have suggestions for good workarounds, you can post them here.
@shoteyes So, the author made the question bad again after it received a good score and attention ? This is not only weird, it is rude and clearly against the spirit of this site. This action should be flagged.
@Peter Well, the context I like is when the OP tells us where the question came up. So their "motivation" is halfway there, and my suggested improvement is saying where this motivation comes from.
@MartinR: I difference of $1$ and $-1$ matters when the exponent of $x$ is even. The expression $x^{2n}+1$ is irreducible but $x^{2n}-1$ is not. Apart from that case I think we can apply the same technique if degree is odd.
@MartinR: I had a look again and it appears only odd degree is being discussed in that question, but I agree with your judgement to leave this for experts.
@Peter It's repost here is the one Arctic Char linked to. Unfortunately, my close vote there was invalidated when the original was deleted (which I didn't know would happen!).
@amWhy The SE Close Vote Request Generator , which I had some trouble pushing through. Anyway, right now I'm just rummaging through the canisters filled with downvoted questions and pulling up those that should be dealt with!
It's actually really nice to use, and I find it quite informative!
