Why? The only thing closing a question does is prevent new people from answering. In some sense it's in fact a better “deal” for those who did answer before the

Why? The only thing closing a question does is prevent new people from answering. In some sense it's in fact a better “deal” for those who did answer before the question was closed, because they'll have less “competition”. (Of course no one is thinking in those terms, but I'm trying to understand why questions being closed or not should be a deterrence to someone answering questions that are open.) Where do terms like “self-righteousness” come from? (Also note that it's not the “moderators” who close or open questions, but the community itself: anyone with over 3000 points can close or reopen, which right now is over 500 users on MathOverflow. It's a small site as it's for research mathematicians; for comparison on Stack Overflow there are over 46000 users who can vote to close or reopen questions.)