Stack Overflow is a huge community and they want to keep the quality of both the questions and the answers high. If they wouldn't downvote low quality questions

Stack Overflow is a huge community and they want to keep the quality of both the questions and the answers high. If they wouldn't downvote low quality questions, then the search function would degrade significantly. So newbies will always have a good chance of having a negative experience, even if it's done in the most respectable way with constructive criticism. I'm not sure much can be done against that, except perhaps better preparing first time question askers by having them go through a short tutorial before they can ask a question, or having first-time questions handled differently from regular ones (ie, only visible to moderators, so they don't attract too many negative comments from regular users).