So, this comes from looking at Why reward an answer to a low quality question?. Basically, I don't like legalism, so rather than ask questions about specific cases, I'm trying to acquire a general guideline for how SO thinks.
In this case, there are lots of questions which are fairly low quality and could be answered with 10 minutes on google. These questions are often closed, and sometimes they have already picked up an accepted answer before closing. (not always - after all, why bother for an already-answered question?)
These don't really cost much, because they are nearly trivial to answer, but also mean reviewers are 'wasting' time on trivial questions, and avoiding questions that give the same rep, but are a lot more work to edit - they may require actually looking at docs, verifying results in a console, etc. But obviously, these are the ones that are more valuable, and it would be worth encouraging more of these.
What is the thought for how to incentivize this kind of behaviour? Would it make sense to grant a reputation bonus for late answers that are voted up/accepted (based on posting time, not vote time) vs. immediate, quick answers, to give an incentive here?
Maybe the right answer is just to get better about deleting the closed questions that are low quality, since that will vaporize the reputation as well... users would spend less time on answers to obviously low quality questions if they knew that any reputation gained from it was temporary.
Thoughts? Posted as discussion instead of feature request, because from what I've seen so far, someone has already probably thought this through a lot, and I just didn't find it in the search.