So that does exist, but it takes a LONG time for it to get cleaned up in some cases. And if people jump in with a "this might answer your question, hope it helps", it will likely never get deleted.
Its not that these questions hurt the site - bits are cheap. Its that they hurt the search results and the perception of the site. Admittedly a single reddit data point: https://www.reddit.com/r/stackoverflow/comments/8d15h4/10000...
> The toxicity is in all the unanswered questions.
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> What I see is questions which are not phrased well but you can actually work out what they're asking being closed.
Consider fixing the question with an edit before writing the answer so that it won't be closed when you get around to writing an answer. This way its a good question from an earlier point in the life of the question. Furthermore, it makes it easier for other people to provide answers too. Leaving the question in a poor state with an answer makes it harder for the google only user to find the question and understand what is being asked.
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Doing the right thing in review takes time. Many of the first post or triage reviews are done by people who haven't... fully bought into the philosophy of answers for people who haven't asked the question yet. They look ok to the standards of a 500 rep user who doesn't see what Jeff and Joel were trying for with Stack Overflow ( https://stackoverflow.com/help/privileges/access-review-queu... ).
There's no instruction for people for how to help in the review queues. As such, everyone is doing their own thing with their own "this is the quality that I'd write at, it looks ok." The only way to correct this currently is with review bans... and that has its own problems with negativity and the perception of Stack Overflow as elitist.
I don't expect every bad question will lead to a valuable mentorship opportunity. I've certainly encountered my fair share of those that weren't worth spending my time on.
Bad answers are more problematic; there's good reason to be vigilent about those.
And of course spam, obvious homework, and just completely incomprehensible questions should be closed instantly.
What I see is questions which are not phrased well but you can actually work out what they're asking being closed. So by the time I've written up an answer, the question is closed, and my answer is wasted. I can copy my answer elsewhere, and vote to re-open, maybe after editing the question to make it more clear, and it might get re-opened, but then I have to spend a lot more time and attention waiting for that. By closing out questions too aggressively, not only are people putting off newcomers, but also wasting the time of those answering questions.
> The first post review and triage queues are intended for providing this help. You can see that this doesn't always work well ( https://stackoverflow.com/review/first-posts/19570266 or https://stackoverflow.com/review/first-posts/19569647 - note the not even trying to fix the grammar of the question or asking for the necessary information or providing help on how to improve the question, just no action needed)
Yeah, one of the things that really frustrates me about the review process is that they just incentivize taking some quick and easy action, not actually doing the right thing.
Effective moderation is not easy, and a very different skill set than answering technical questions, but the rep needed to perform many of these mod duties is just given to those who accrue enough rep.