I've been involved with several other stack exchange communities but this one seems to close more questions, and quicker than others do. I'm not trying to spark any wars here but I am genuinely curious if there is some benefit to closing questions (other than keeping crap out of the site). Are there metrics on "open, unanswered questions" or something that people are looking at?

Full disclosure, I did ask a question yesterday that got closed and marked as off topic. Personally, I think the question is on topic but I wholly admit that I am new to this community and may not fully understand the scope. The fact that it was closed and agreed upon by 4 mods makes me believe that this may be the case but the fact that there was no comment or any clue as to how to improve it, I have no idea. That lead me to check out meta and I see that this tends to happen a fair amount, questions are closed and eventually often re-opened. So why so quick to close rather than comment and help to improve questions?

I've been involved with several other stack exchange communities but this one seems to close more questions, and quicker than others do. I'm not trying to spark any wars here but I am genuinely curious if there is some benefit to closing questions (other than keeping crap out of the site). Are there metrics on "open, unanswered questions" or something that people are looking at?

Full disclosure, I did ask a question yesterday that got closed and marked as off topic. Personally, I think the question is on topic but I wholly admit that I am new to this community and may not fully understand the scope. The fact that it was closed and agreed upon by 4 mods makes me believe that this may be the case but the fact that there was no comment or any clue as to how to improve it, I have no idea. That lead me to check out meta and I see that this tends to happen a fair amount, questions are closed and eventually often re-opened. So why so quick to close rather than comment and help to improve questions?