There is a fine line between piling too much into one question versus creating several questions that are similar. There is no simple single criterion you can use to decide how to ask the several related questions.
Asking too much in a single question makes it difficult to answer because it might require dispelling wrong assumptions implied by some of the questions, or be too long if everything were answered. If the questions are truly related, then sometimes a good answer can go into the background theory, although that is rare. Sometimes one or two of the questions can be answered and the others ignored, but the simplest expedient is to close on account of being too broad or possibly unclear.
On the flip side, closely related separate questions are annoying when roughly the same answer would apply to each of them. You'd rather write a comprehensive answer and not have to repeat it. If the question is interesting, then sometimes a nice answer can be written in one place and the other questions closed as duplicates, pointing to the question with the good answer. However, the most likely and common expedient is to simply close all of them as duplicates. If the offense is particularly egregious, it's great fun to close all of them, each pointing to one of the others.
So what to do? Three things:
- First and foremost, get a grip on what you really want to know. If you think you have several related questions, then you really have a misunderstanding or a knowledge gap one conceptual level up. Identify that properly and ask about that, but be careful not to make it so general as tell me about ....
- Consider the answers instead of your questions. If a single well written answer can tell you what you really want to know, then ask a single question. If the answers will be mostly unrelated, then ask separate questions. However, see point 1 first. If that still doesn't work, see point 3 first.
- Ask one question at a time. See point 1 first. Hopefully the right single question is all you need. If you still think you have multiple questions, pick the one you really want to know about most, or the one that might help with the others if you understood the answer, and ask just that one. There is some chance that the answers will fill in the other things you would have asked anyway.
If not, wait a couple of days, then ask the next question, referencing the first. It would help to make it clear you learned something from the previous question, but that has lead to confusion about xxx. This shows you are trying to learn, are actually reading other answers, and implicitly shows the new question is not a duplicate of the first.
Above all, remember that this site isn't about you. You have to look at it not from the point of view of what you are here to get, but how to give those you seek a favor from the opportunity to do what they came here to do. There is no such thing as true altruism, no matter how much some people claim there are here just to help you. Nonsense. Everyone is here for their own personal private selfish reasons. They want to look smart, gain a high reputation (not the SE numerical kind) among their peers, like to contemplate interesting problems in their field, like teaching, etc. None of this has anything to do with solving your silly-ass problem directly. That is just collateral gain on the way so some other goal.
Since nobody gives a crap about you or your problem directly, and we get plenty of traffic here, questions that don't let people fulfill their purposes are dealt with expediently. That can mean downvoting and voting to close, sometimes for the quickest handiest reason whether it applies or not if the question is particularly bad.
That all said, the mechanisms for people to get what they want here are set up to provide good answers, but only to questions that are well asked, aren't annoying to read, and don't appear to waste the answerer's time. Keep all this in mind, and you can get a lot out of this site.
