Ok. So you decide you like an abstraction. H&I. You wanna help people, and you're hoping H&I can point you in the direction of folks who can be helped.
So far so good. But then you find a question in H&I that you can't help.
You have a basic decision to make: are you gonna stay within the bounds of this abstraction, or are you gonna abandon it?
If you stay with it, you have those three choices I mentioned earlier:
- Edit
- Skip
- Flag
Edit is taking responsibility for the post.
The abstraction is thinnest here; there's really not much difference between editing in H&I and just... editing.
Which is sorta the whole point: funnel people into editing.
Skip is the opposite - taking NO responsibility for the post.
It keeps you fully within the abstraction, the funnel, and gives you another post to edit.
The post you skipped will be shown to someone else... Or maybe not. Doesn't matter; you've abdicated responsibility, and it's no longer your concern.
Flag is the wildcard. This is where the abstraction gets really thick, because you're not directly controlling anything, but you're saying "I strongly suspect this question is a waste of time here"
again, once you choose that option the matter is out of your hands - the responsibility for dealing with it is on someone else.
But you're giving it a little bit of a nudge, saying "hey, maybe this shouldn't go in front of another editor without some sanity checking first"
The system might run it through Triage to get a better feel for where it should go, or it might toss it in front of a moderator.
You don't know, you can't control that. Where it goes, who deals with it, that'll depend on a bunch of factors that are out of your control.
Thus concludes the scope of the H&I abstraction.
...which you don't actually have to use, and can abandon at any time.
If, for the sake of example, you come across a post that you feel... Invested in.
You have Strong Opinions on what is wrong with it, and what should happen with it
and have full access to all the normal tools
Camp on it, waiting to vote to delete it.
Flag it as spam or offensive.
Heck, you can leave a comment offering guidance to the author if you want.
(you can do that last one in H&I too though, with or without an edit, although editing is strongly encouraged - still, presumably if you wanted to do that you'd already have done it.)
Anyway, this is a lot more work. You're actually taking real responsibility here for getting rid of a question.
Getting folks to do that is... really hard.