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What purpose does downvoting questions serve?
It seems like an off-topic question will get a few negative votes, in addition to eventually being closed. Isn't closing the question punishment enough for the user? Should they really also lose reputation? This seems very discouraging to new users, where every point of reputation is hard-won.
If the question doesn't belong (i.e. it gets closed), then the reputation penalty can be removed when the question eventually gets deleted via recalc. So in terms of reputation impact, on new and old users, that's not really an issue.
Negative voting is necessary on questions because it provides signals to both the system and the community. To the community, it helps indicate poor quality questions, and this is an important utility. To the system, it does much the same, but the system capitalizes on this by monitoring users who consistently provide low quality questions.
A user that provides many poor contributions may eventually be prevented from posting further questions. Whether it's because they're consistently posting just plain junk, or if they're posting something that's off-topic every time, it's basically the same signal - they're contributing noise.
Closing isn't used as "punishment" on users. It's administered to the question, on the merits of the question as presented, not on the behavior of the user. As such, closers in the community aren't what's "punishing" the user. It's their own questions that's doing so.
/reputation.
Jun 1, 2011 at 15:02
Yes, they make a lot of sense. Downvoting questions helps to weed out the bad ones, the ones that don't belong on the front page. Remember there's only a limited number of spaces available, both in the physical sense of the site's layout and in the mindshare of our users. Bad questions detract from the other good questions, pushing them off the front page and out of the minds of users who could otherwise provide a quality answer useful to many other people.
Beyond that, your premise is fundamentally flawed: not all bad questions eventually get closed (or deleted), and especially not as "off-topic". There are a number of questions that I simply can't find an applicable close reason for, but I still think are bad questions. In fact, this one is a good example: it's completely on topic, but I don't think it's a very good question. It doesn't show much research effort or thoughtful consideration. So I downvoted it.
Edit: Never mind. I found an applicable close reason: it turns out that this is a duplicate. Doesn't change the fact that I think it deserves to be downvoted, as well. I disagree with the interpretation that the only "bad" question is one that shouldn't have been asked in the first place. There are lots of things to go wrong with questions. If you haven't seen them all, you clearly haven't spent enough time on SO.
