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Bad questions are full of problems as vagueness, broadness, ambiguity, errors and a lot of more problems. See this question and especially its answers for a further discussion about how to evaluate if a question is good or not.

When still unsolved, many people may think that the question is in fact good, and sincerely starts to make his/her brains works to found a solution. When they found something that might be an answer to the question they post it, in hope that it might be the correct answer or at least get some advice of the correct solution. Other people, post ridiculous trollish answers as a way to subtly tell the question author that his question is crappy.

I disagree that lateral-thinking and PPCG's code-trolling are somewhat related. The purpose of code-trolling is/was to ridicule awful gimme-teh-codez SO questions (and I know this because I am the inventor of code-trolling). Lateral-thinking has nothing to do with that, the author has an intended correct solution, and the tag is used to tell that there is an unknown context unclear in the question that needs to be guessed in order to find the correct answer. About the answers, this is very different too. In code-trolling you are/were supposed to post answers trolling the fictional bad question OP. In lateral-thinking, answerers are supposed to try to find the correct and serious answer, and most people do (or at least try to do) that. What happens is that some people just do wild/strange guesses or post trolling answers ridiculing the actual question itself or the process needed to find the answer, and not because they are supposed to do that.

So we may get back to this question. Although it is negatively scored at the moment that I am writing this and is indeed broad, it goes directly to where the problem lies and should be better evaluated IMO. I really recommend people to read the answers and to try to post additional answers to that question, regardless the fact that it is broad or not (this could and IMO should be fixed by editing and/or making the question community-wiki and/or migrating it to meta).

The majority of people here have no clear directive about how to write a good question, it is entirely based on intuition and/or imitating. I didn't saw anything clear about that in meta and this question (again) that is asking about this is just a few days old and negatively voted at the time that I am writing this.

That is a one-million dollar question! It is very hard to tell what is or not a good puzzle or riddle if you don't know the solution. This way, people don't know how to vote on questions, only on answers. We have a question about that here. And again, this question is very recent, so we are just starting to debate the issue, a very large and important issue. Without knowing how to evaluate a puzzle or riddle without knowing the answer, it is very hard to improve the quality and we are just starting to debate this.

Bad questions are full of problems as vagueness, broadness, ambiguity, errors and a lot of more problems. See this question and especially its answers for a further discussion about how to evaluate if a question is good or not.

When still unsolved, many people may think that the question is in fact good, and sincerely starts to make his/her brains works to found a solution. When they found something that might be an answer to the question they post it, in hope that it might be the correct answer or at least get some advice of the correct solution. Other people, post ridiculous trollish answers as a way to subtly tell the question author that his question is crappy.

I disagree that lateral-thinking and PPCG's code-trolling are somewhat related. The purpose of code-trolling is/was to ridicule awful gimme-teh-codez SO questions (and I know this because I am the inventor of code-trolling). Lateral-thinking has nothing to do with that, the author has an intended correct solution, and the tag is used to tell that there is an unknown context unclear in the question that needs to be guessed in order to find the correct answer. About the answers, this is very different too. In code-trolling you are/were supposed to post answers trolling the fictional bad question OP. In lateral-thinking, answerers are supposed to try to find the correct and serious answer, and most people do (or at least try to do) that. What happens is that some people just do wild/strange guesses or post trolling answers ridiculing the actual question itself or the process needed to find the answer, and not because they are supposed to do that.

So we may get back to this question. Although it is negatively scored at the moment that I am writing this and is indeed broad, it goes directly to where the problem lies and should be better evaluated IMO. I really recommend people to read the answers and to try to post additional answers to that question, regardless the fact that it is broad or not (this could and IMO should be fixed by editing and/or making the question community-wiki and/or migrating it to meta).

The majority of people here have no clear directive about how to write a good question, it is entirely based on intuition and/or imitating. I didn't saw anything clear about that in meta and this question (again) that is asking about this is just a few days old and negatively voted at the time that I am writing this.

That is a one-million dollar question! It is very hard to tell what is or not a good puzzle or riddle if you don't know the solution. This way, people don't know how to vote on questions, only on answers. We have a question about that here. And again, this question is very recent, so we are just starting to debate the issue, a very large and important issue. Without knowing how to evaluate a puzzle or riddle without knowing the answer, it is very hard to improve the quality and we are just starting to debate this.

Bad questions are full of problems as vagueness, broadness, ambiguity, errors and a lot of more problems. See this question and specially its answers for a further discussion about how to evaluate if a question is good or not.

• Discuss more about question-writing here in meta (or even in the main site). We currently are lacking a good debate of how a question writer could improve his/her skills in question writing. I will not discuss it in detail here because this is not the purpose of this question, but we should really create some (meta-)questions dedicated for this. Without these, we will not have any improvement in questions quality. And the debate need to be much more focused in writing questions than in disputes about if spoilers are good or not or if deciding that X or Y are or not on-topic. We need to train the community about how to write good questions and not about how to downvote and close crappy questions.

• Provide feedback to question writers. When you write a question that you think that is good (even if it is not), it is really frustrating to get downvotes popping out from nowhere without a single word telling you why. It is still worse if your question is suddenly closed without anyone telling that before its closure (and remember, people without enough rep can't see the close-votes). If you think that the question has some problem, even if it is glaring obvious for you, post a comment. This way the author will be able to learn from it instead of only getting frustration that could even result in he/she going away from the site forever.

• Good questions attract good answers. People naturally are more zealous on posting answers than questions. We have more directives on meta about posting answers than posting questions. Bad answers are quickly defeat by better answers due to the voting system and this happens because the SE QA format was designed to naturally put a selection pressure for better answers. If the question is great, an eventual answerer rarely will post an stupid answer because he/she knows that this would only attract downvotes or make his/her answer be ignored. OTOH, no such pressure exists for questions, and if a particular question is bad, people are unwilling to put work in trying to answer, or may end posting answers that are as bad as the question, or may post trollish answers, overly creative answers, or just strange/wild guesses in hope to find the answer by luck. So I conclude that the key to improve the answers is to improve the questions.

• Be nice, specially to newcomers. No one born knowing how to write great questions and answers. It is almost impossible to write a good question or answer without some mistake that will needed to be fixed by editing later. Most people don't know how to write great questions or answers, but they are invited to participate and try anyway, otherwise we would create an elitist and doomed community. Everyone starts by writing crappy or mediocre questions and improve with time, so we should not discourage them.

Writing good riddles is harder than writing good puzzles (or even non-puzzling questions) on any other category, but it is indeed possible and have been done here before anyway. But again, we are severely lacking meta-questions and directives about how to write good questions (and specially riddles), and without these, the quality will never improve.

Bad questions are full of problems as vagueness, broadness, ambiguity, errors and a lot of more problems. See this question and especially its answers for a further discussion about how to evaluate if a question is good or not.

• Discuss more about question-writing here in meta (or even in the main site). We currently are lacking a good debate of how a question writer could improve his/her skills in question writing. I will not discuss it in detail here because this is not the purpose of this question, but we should really create some (meta-)questions dedicated for this. Without these, we will not have any improvement in questions quality. And the debate need to be much more focused in writing questions than in disputes about if spoilers are good or not or if deciding that X or Y are or not on-topic. We need to train the community about how to write good questions and not about how to downvote and close crappy questions.

• Provide feedback to question writers. When you write a question that you think that is good (even if it is not), it is really frustrating to get downvotes popping out from nowhere without a single word telling you why. It is still worse if your question is suddenly closed without anyone telling that before its closure (and remember, people without enough rep can't see the close-votes). If you think that the question has some problem, even if it is glaring obvious for you, post a comment. This way the author will be able to learn from it instead of only getting frustration that could even result in he/she going away from the site forever.

• Good questions attract good answers. People naturally are more zealous on posting answers than questions. We have more directives on meta about posting answers than posting questions. Bad answers are quickly defeat by better answers due to the voting system and this happens because the SE QA format was designed to naturally put a selection pressure for better answers. If the question is great, an eventual answerer rarely will post an stupid answer because he/she knows that this would only attract downvotes or make his/her answer be ignored. OTOH, no such pressure exists for questions, and if a particular question is bad, people are unwilling to put work in trying to answer, or may end posting answers that are as bad as the question, or may post trollish answers, overly creative answers, or just strange/wild guesses in hope to find the answer by luck. So I conclude that the key to improve the answers is to improve the questions.

• Be nice, especially to newcomers. No one born knowing how to write great questions and answers. It is almost impossible to write a good question or answer without some mistake that will needed to be fixed by editing later. Most people don't know how to write great questions or answers, but they are invited to participate and try anyway, otherwise we would create an elitist and doomed community. Everyone starts by writing crappy or mediocre questions and improve with time, so we should not discourage them.

Writing good riddles is harder than writing good puzzles (or even non-puzzling questions) on any other category, but it is indeed possible and have been done here before anyway. But again, we are severely lacking meta-questions and directives about how to write good questions (and especially riddles), and without these, the quality will never improve.

• In Area 51, the example questions have no bodies, so they must be entirely self-contained only in the title.
• Most puzzles and riddles are impossible to be crammed to a single title. At least for me, I discarded some questions simply because I found no way to reduce them to only a title.
• In order to cram the most content in a single title, a lot of coordinate effort was necessary from many people.
• The reason that driven the improvement of the titles was that if they are not self-descriptive enough, a diamond moderator might sudden close them as "too broad" or "not a real question". Again, since they have no bodies, there was nothing to redeem the question otherwise.

• In Area 51, the example questions have no bodies, so they must be entirely self-contained only in the title.
• Most puzzles and riddles are impossible to be crammed to a single title. At least for me, I discarded some questions simply because I found no way to reduce them to only a title.
• In order to cram the most content in a single title, a lot of coordinate effort was necessary from many people. That was not an easy task afterall.
• The reason that driven the improvement of the titles was that if they are not self-descriptive enough, a diamond moderator might suddenly close them as "too broad" or "not a real question". Again, since they have no bodies, there was nothing to redeem the question otherwise.