Let's take this question as an example (for no particular reason other than its on the front page).
Here's the path to my downvote:
- My first inclination is to vote to close it as Not A Real Question, because after reading it through once or twice I can't tell what the person is actually asking.
- English is probably not the poster's first language, so that's probably a big part of why the question is so unclear - I certainly can't hold that against him.
- After reading the question again its vaguely interesting to me, but still not very clear what is being asked. Sysadmin1138 teases the real question out which is about the tradeoffs between dedicated and "cloud" hosting.
- Downvote and comment for more information.
If my experience is any indication that information will never be provided. It is very frustrating to go to the work to salvage a question and to have your efforts met with a response like, "Which one is better?" or "Can you just immediately solve my problem without any of the information to do so?". This is a frustrating and increasingly frequent experience here.
My general approach is not use downvotes to indicate my view of the quality of the question. Nine times of ten - I'll just flag it for closing. I downvote questions as incentive for the poster to salvage the question. This requires a comment it also requires more work on my part.
Downvoting the question because it's "bad" doesn't fix it. In my opinion, the best way to go about it is too 1) vote to close or migrate depending on quality, 2) edit or fix the question yourself if that's possible, 3) comment and downvote. As I said, nine times out of ten the question is never fixed by the poster - its easier to just close it.
Don't want downvotes? Don't make people try to ask your question for you.