@GabrielRomon Why did you answer a question which you knew was an exact duplicate? I mean, a case could be made for merging that question. But your course of action in particular is somewhat disturbing.
In case it is not clear, this is bad practice. (See meta.stackexchange.com/a/10844 . In particular, "Should I answer it? No, not if you think it is a duplicate.")
The question already had 3 answers when I posted mine. Given the comments below it, people learnt a trick from it. It should be undeleted and merged not because I'm hungry for rep, but rather because 3 users took the time to post an answer
With the exception of the first phrase, your comment is a posteriori. The fact that the question had 3 answers is irrelevant. There were several courses of actions you could have taken: just voting to close, adding an answer to the original, flagging for merging etc. Yours was at best misguided, and wrong regardless of intention.
@GabrielRomon Upvotes and downvotes are, according the software, an answer to the question "Did you find this question useful?" Closure and deletion are about how well a question conforms to the guidelines and standards of the site. These two things are orthogonal: someone might find a question useful and upvote it while simultaneously feeling that it is off-topic and voting to close it.
It should also be noted that (1) people are much more likely to upvote than to downvote (and, in fact, users are penalized for downvoting answers) and (2) there are vastly more users who vote on questions than there are users who engage with meta and are interested in site maintenance; as such, it is very easy for a poor question to garner upvotes from users who are ignorant of the site standards.
That is, upvotes come from a larger set of users, many (most?) of whom are likely uninterested in the goals of MSE as a repository of knowledge.
Basically, while I think that the net score of a question should be one factor in determining whether or not a question should be closed or deleted, I do not think that it should be a very important factor.
Finally, I think that it is more important to quickly close/delete highly upvoted questions which violate the site standards; doing so should, hopefully discourage future users from asking such questions and, more importantly, discourage current users from answering such questions.
With respect to older low-scoring questions, the system has already worked: they have been marked as low quality and are farther down the indexing on search engines. While it would be nice to delete these questions, there simply isn't enough person-power; there are not enough janitors to clean up that mess and also keep up with the flood of new questions.
From the point of view of triage, new low-quality which garner upvotes are a more important target for cleanup than old, highly downvoted questions.
