Where to discuss arguments for or against closing a question?

Question

I noticed that this particular question is being down voted and received some close votes: Why is Vim pasting after the cursor?

Where is the correct place to discuss or disagree with such close votes? I was not sure if the comments would give enough space and be the right place so I post my arguments here. Please see if they apply (in this case and in general).

The title of the question seems to be a perfectly valid question for this site in my opinion. The text in the question itself is a bit opinion loaded and the author says things like:

Is this something important for the workflow or is this just a mistake made 40 years ago?

Is this behavior useful for something is is it just not logical?

I assume that the down votes and close votes where cast because that sounds a bit rude (towards our beloved $EDITOR :) and opinionated (the close vote is marked as "opinion based"). But I do not think that answers to the title question are opinion based, which would be a valid reason. In fact the two that are given (I confess I gave one) are not opinion based in my opinion. Additionally I argue that the fact that this question has seen so much activity in such a short time also indicates that it is interesting to the community (I remember wondering about this as well when I started using vim/terminals).

I also would like to correct the tone of that question a little bit although I can not say that it is offensive to me as the reader. But I have trouble thinking up an edit or a comment for this question to do that.

Answer 1

We have several points to address here!

First, about the close votes:

Usually, we don't need to discuss them: several people can vote to close a question and it takes five votes to close the question. So for the question you are referring to, nothing will be closed unless four other people vote too.

Also close votes age away harmlessly if the threshold is not reached after a number of days. If the question has at least 100 views, close votes will age away after 4 days; otherwise close votes will age away after 14 days. Each new close vote resets the timer, so all close votes must be at least 4 or 14 days old respectively before aging occurs.

I have never seen it happen on our site but if you find a question which has been closed unfairly you can still use the "flag" button under the question. This way the moderators of the site will review it and can reopen it if needed.

Finally, if you feel like there really need to be a discussion about the question you can use the chat and ping the relevant people.

This page should give you all the other information you might need about close votes.

Now about the downvotes:

Maybe they were due to the tone of the question as you pointed out. Maybe they were due to the misleading title: Why is Vim pasting after the cursor? is actually pretty vague since you can put text before and after the cursor. Or maybe our users are grumpy on Mondays.

Whatever the reasons, there is not much we can do: people are allowed to choose what they consider to be a good or bad question and as long as they don't break the rules we can't change their votes.

At last about the edit of the question, I don't really agree with the tone of the question but I don't think it really breaks any rule so I prefer to let the choice to the OP to change it or not.

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Anyway, thank you for taking the time to discuss this because it is with involved users like you that our site will be able to last! And if you have any follow up question you can use comments under this question or ping me in the chat that I linked earlier.