I have found myself bewildered by a meldrum-conundrum, and I suggest a way of getting out of it.
So let's say we have a new user, a person who is getting used to the site and thus should be afforded a margin of error (I do so : whether it should be done is a debate for a different question). She/he has written a question that is poor but is improvable with directions from experienced users. I often find first replies (by first replies , I refer to all comments made before the OP's first comment) that immediately point to improvement of the post, such as "the following tag is incorrect" or "please type in MathJax" or "What is your background? Please add context" (all these are shortened versions of what is often, but I hope I communicate the content in these comments correctly).
What happens in this case sometimes is one of the two "undesirable" things :
The user is led to believe that improving the post is a must before getting an answer. While this is in fact the right attitude to inculcate, I do feel that users will consider it a burden to do so, and may abandon the question, leaving a poor question in the lurch, one that may have been useful if improved.
The user replies rudely, like "just answer my question, I don't know why you seem to focus on such matters that are peripheral to me". That severely restricts conversation with the user, and then you can't even mathematically communicate with freedom, let alone communicate issues in the question. This leaves another question that could have been improved hanging.
There definitely are reasons of putting such comments first, some of which include :
The site's quality is a priority over subsequent mathematical conversation, and the user's interest in the question is gauged immediately by the effort they make to improve their question.
Once the question improves, that improves the attention it gets and hence users can answer it, compared to them being reserved in doing so if the question is of poor quality while conversation to improve it takes place in the comments (although some users still answer poorly written questions, there's content about the size of the Titanic on that particular issue which I will not touch, unlike the icebergs that did so)
Now, my aim is to reduce the rudeness/animosity that may often be displayed in comments resulting from first replies. I do not think that everyone will agree, but I for one believe that if I put out to a user things that she/he may think are unrelated to the mathematical matter that is to be discussed, then this increases the chance of that user actually not registering this particular point, and either being dismayed or disgruntled, leading to a poisoned conversation.
Perhaps then, "first replies" should consist of mathematical feedback as much as possible? Or at least a hybrid of mathematical and post-related feedback?
Yes, this is my thought.
In more precision, if I wanted a user to improve his/her question, then I could mention something about the mathematics in the question they wrote, and attempt to initiate a comment from the user that says "ok I think we are in a good position to talk" and then once you have gauged the user's interest in the comments, you could politely ask them to improve the question and receive a response that would at least not be rude?
Some positives of doing this are as follows :
The user could be more inclined to make the changes once he/she has received a confirmation of sorts that his/her question will be addressed for certain, as first replies will indicate.
The user receives a feel-good factor from the above process and realizes the importance of having detailed posts, so may write better posts in the future.
There's no harm done, in the sense that if there's no response to a first reply then you just vote to close and delete, and if there are replies they can only be positive since the first replies have sought to address the user's mathematical doubt with intent.
Some of the pitfalls of this could be :
Another user, without asking for the permission of the OP edits the question before we can come to it (when we could have if we'd prioritized it in a first reply), and the OP is lead to the false conclusion that whatever he/she puts out is automatically corrected by others users , who do it quite often so that they can answer the question.
Even after conversation, some users may not necessarily buy into the idea of improving the post, because their concern has been addressed enough in the comments. This leads to self-deletion or abandonment of that question by the OP.
I wish to discuss this, because I think people take the former approach far more than they take the latter, and often face flak from new users over rude behaviour as recent meta posts have suggested. I think the more balanced approach suggested by me could be a way of dealing with new users that leaves neither side disappointed. Responses are welcome, most particularly I'd appreciate if anyone taking a stance comes up with an example to support it.
For example, I refer you to what happened here where a second reply contained a hybrid of mathematics and some details regarding tags and the user immediately loses patience (rude comments have been flagged and deleted, but contained content to the note "please focus on the mathematical content and don't dilute the discussion with stuff I haven't come to discuss"). This OP has no other history of being rude on the site, at least from a brief check. I do agree that this example may be extreme because the first replies were arguably not rude and only sought to find fault in the tags, but it's a matter of how the OP takes it and I think this one could have rankled the OP who lashed out. This example is my main prompt for writing this question. I will look to find other examples and I will post comments on them here when I find them.
$\mathrm{Who\ does\ this\ post \ target?}$
With respect to a new post, there are three categories of participants who can improve the quality of the question :
OP (original poster) whose (most likely) primary purpose is to get an answer to their question.
Site moderators i.e. users who spend a considerable amount of time moderating on the site and visit the question for the purpose of improving it.
Potential answerers , who are users that see the question in view of answering it.
This question targets potential answerers, who may choose to answer a question following its improvement by interacting mathematically with OP before proposing changes.