From the blog post:

Questions that get voted to be closed will be hidden, giving authors the opportunity to improve their questions in private. Our hope is to make it easier on everyone by providing clearer guidance and encouraging better questions.

This does bot encourage better questions. It just hides bad content.

Also, this seems like something that will reduce the community's power to close questions. In other words, more bad content is allowed into the sites for the sake of pretending to be a friendlier place for people who have a hard time with the stack Q&A format.

One thing that I like about Stack Overflow, for example, id that when I have a problem I don't have to search through s... Erm, sand to find what I want or need.

I really love that post from 2011, specially this:

We believe asking questions on our site is a privilege, not a right. If, after a few fair attempts, you haven’t been able to prove that your contributions to a particular Stack Exchange make it at least … not-worse … then we reserve the right to refuse your questions. If we don’t do our part to cull the bad questions, then we risk alienating the true experts who provide what really matters: the answers!

You already took a step away from that philosophy when you made upvotes to questions worth as much as upvotes to answers. Now it seems like tolerance to sand will increase too.

If you want more users in lieu of quality, you can save a lot of effort by just changing format. Rebuild the network as a series of forums. Just saying.

From the blog post:

Questions that get voted to be closed will be hidden, giving authors the opportunity to improve their questions in private. Our hope is to make it easier on everyone by providing clearer guidance and encouraging better questions.

This does not encourage better questions. It just hides bad content.

Also, this seems like something that will reduce the community's power to close questions. In other words, more bad content is allowed into the sites for the sake of pretending to be a friendlier place for people who have a hard time with the stack Q&A format.

One thing that I like about Stack Overflow, for example, is that when I have a problem I don't have to search through s... Erm, sand to find what I want or need.

I really love that post from 2011, specially this:

We believe asking questions on our site is a privilege, not a right. If, after a few fair attempts, you haven’t been able to prove that your contributions to a particular Stack Exchange make it at least … not-worse … then we reserve the right to refuse your questions. If we don’t do our part to cull the bad questions, then we risk alienating the true experts who provide what really matters: the answers!

You already took a step away from that philosophy when you made upvotes to questions worth as much as upvotes to answers. Now it seems like tolerance to sand will increase too.

If you want more users in lieu of quality, you can save a lot of effort by just changing format. Rebuild the network as a series of forums. Just saying.