Stack Exchange could have dealt with this by developing a mechanism for identifying and promoting general and well-written questions to search engines, and so on.
People sometimes have specific or incompletely formulated questions, and people sometimes enjoy figuring out answers to those questions.
By stamping on these situations, Stack Exchange quickly removed almost all of its potential contributor base.
As I have said it encourages additional low quality questions which is more work for the mods.
"low quality" question could just be marked as such and kept mostly unmodorated. By marking them there is also an incentive to produce "high quality" questions. You could also make badges and reputation around it so asking good questions gets more rewarding.
Also, answering those "low quality" can really help the asker to understand his problem better and improve his problem solving ability, so maybe the next time he can provide better information in his question.
If you just close the question and tell people to go away you will just scare people off (which btw also leads to a smaller number of mods)