What can I do to ask better questions on Meta?

It seems that recently when I come to Meta trying to better understand SO, my questions are downvoted as "does not show any research effort, it is unclear or not useful."

I post these questions in earnest, trying to be a better SO citizen. I try to show my research effort in the questions, and be as clear and open as possible in them so that I can be useful if others have similar questions. What am I doing poorly and how can I improve?

Here are the specific questions which got me thinking about this:

• Why was this answer-should-be-an-edit-or-comment flag declined?
• What was wrong with this edit that changed code to be more efficient?