@AlexisKing so what problem do you wish to solve?

hopes it wll be this

@Shog9 Perhaps this is an uncommon situation, but I do (or did) go through the queue as much as I can. And then this happens:

> When I run out of close votes, I stop trying to answer questions in poor-quality tags because I'm frustrated I can't close the awful ones.

This was my pain point, and clearly other people shared it with me.

(As an aside, keeping the review queue small will make it easier to make @rene’s linked proposal easier to swallow, as mentioned in the first half of my answer.)

@AlexisKing So, here's an alternate problem: it takes 5 votes to close a question (in most cases).

Which means for every post that needs to be closed, at least 5 people have to be involved.

5 votes need to be spent.

If you go through your tag and vote to close every bad question you find until you run out of votes, that's (under the default limits) another 50*4 votes that'll be needed for your votes to mean anything.

@rene remind me when it's close to Christmas

Which is fine, if you have 4 other people going through the same tags doing the same thing.

@Bart you're gonna regret that ...

so here's some quick numbers...

In the past 30 days, 67533 close votes were raised on questions that hadn't previously seen a close vote and weren't created from within review (so weren't hitting flagged posts either).

@Shog9 I think perhaps cutting part of my answer in editing was a bad idea. I originally stressed how much this is not even really about closing questions but is actually about user experience. The “panic button” bit is most of what remains, but it is perhaps unclear.

Does this make sense? Or is it an oversimplification of the problem?

The effect of having fewer close votes is almost certainly not that a huge number of questions aren’t getting closed that otherwise would be—it’s that I stop participating on the site when I get frustrated by an inability to moderate.

ok.

@404 Entenmann's makes the best cookies. If you can grab them... half the time they're sold out.

I am going to be honest: I entirely stopped participating on Stack Overflow except in my low-traffic tags about six months ago. Now, sure, some of that was because I got busier, but that was not the whole issue. Voting to close questions is cathartic compared to just clicking on twenty questions and hating them all but having to just let them slide. I was drowning in garbage, @Shog, and I was tired of being helpless to deal with it. So I withdrew.

@AlexisKing Find questions with four close votes. Then you can close them...

I don’t know if this is a big problem. For all I know, this is a unique issue. But my gut tells me that there are people who feel the same way, and I would bet that those are some of Stack Overflow’s most valuable users.

@hichris123 we have an option for that in the SOCVR ...

@hichris123 This doesn’t have to do with wanting to close questions. I want to make that clear. I get frustrated when looking to answer questions and being drowned in crap.

Oh well that too.

@AlexisKing Now we're getting somewhere.

Voting to close is cathartic, but not particularly effective, especially in low-traffic tags.

I am talking about high-traffic tags here.

Checking /questions for any tag is... kinda sad. Some are decent questions that need editing; a lot are just unsalvageable.

@rene There's SEDE. ;)

I have continued participating in low-traffic tags, and it is true that VTC is useless there.

But that’s a separate problem.

solution: only people with >1k reputation as of now can ask questions going forward.

In high-traffic tags, you at least can depend on other people seeing them (even if not in review).

... actually, that might do some good. Require 10 rep to ask a question; force people to answer. It'll never happen, of course, because there are considerations other than just quality.

@Shog9 to provide an example: meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/319437/…

In low-traffic tags, you probably depend on review.

At least somewhat similar.

Yeah. But I don’t want to talk about low traffic tags because they are not related to this problem.

> Remember back in school, when a teacher would punish everyone because a few people were doing something that they weren't supposed to be doing? That's what we would be doing here. And I don't think that's the right solution.

I do think that close vote reviewing would be a little more tolerable if we could filter by OT reason. I can get in a groove on SR ones, then on MVCE ones, etc.

@hichris123 I think the trouble here is actually the inverse: we would be punishing a few good people for something that a majority of users were doing wrong.

Getting the whole gamut thrown at me is hard

So yeah. Remember that 67K count for "initial" close votes? The vote count for review was 57K for the same period. Roughly 17K questions closed within review (perhaps somewhat more with a combination of review + external votes).

That's about as good as can be expected for that number of votes.

@Shog9 I am not sure what you are getting at or how this is relevant to my qualms. (Also, sorry for the terseness, I am a little snappy right now.)

Ignoring mods, external votes and dup-hammers, it's actually better than can be expected.

@AlexisKing Assume good faith... I think most people can write a good question, they just don't know how to. Shog probably has better statistics than I do on this, but my gut tells me that more questions are just plain old boring vs. questions that should be closed/deleted.

@AlexisKing What I'm getting at here is that while more votes may be cathartic for you, it just means fewer questions actually get closed.

How long will it continue to be cathartic?

@Shog9 Why fewer rather than simply about the same number?

@AlexisKing fewer at least as a percentage

possibly fewer in real numbers, if it causes the queue to grow beyond where stuff can get enough attention

The big goal of accelerated aging was to kick stuff out of the queue (out of consideration for closing altogether) if it wasn't getting the attention needed to actually accomplish anything.

@Shog9 That sounds like something that is experiment-worthy rather than just throwing more close votes as people and giving more people more time in the sewer CVQ and seeing what happens.

@AlexisKing uh, yeah. We experimented with this repeatedly a couple years ago

I wonder if people could be given gold-badge type privs for not-dupes. I'm thinking MVCE, SR, etc. closures that are very clear cut.

Queue is small + few votes needed == lots of stuff closed. Queue is big + lots of votes needed, few things closed.

@404 Leading to the "show me some wonderful questions/answers after I'm done reviewing" request... which I can't find at the moment.

Small + lots of votes needed still not great, but better than big and lots.

@Shog9 Oh yeah? Giving people more close votes? Is there something about this on meta somewhere as historical documentation?

@AlexisKing that's what we're testing right now.

moving on

you want catharsis. I want stuff to actually be closed, but I'm not against catharsis if it aids in this.

Fair. Your points make sense to me.

If it's counter-productive, then we need to probably reduce the number of close votes and find a way to encourage downvoting

I think the trouble is that downvoting is effectively useless in discouraging vampire behavior.

People still answer heavily downvoted questions.

Because the truth is, if you're just voting for catharsis - if there's only a small chance others will vote in kind - a downvote is infinitely more effective at reducing future crap.

As a note: according to @rene's fancy graph the trend is slightly down from the time the experiment started. I wouldn't count on this chicken hatching, but...

I'm not sure catharsis is even the answer here. I've had a hammer on SO for almost two weeks now... and CV reviewing is still hard. A little, tiny, miniscule bit more fun, but still hard on the neurons.

Even if the question is deleted, it is likely that people got their answer, and people just spamming for rep won’t care if a few answers are deleted here and there.

@Undo Again, this is not about the CVQ, it is about normal browsing.

@AlexisKing Even there. It's a little bit more fun, still hard and tiring.

@Undo I don’t find wading through sludge fun, but I find it more annoying when I find a particularly stinky piece of garbage and can’t even attempt to throw it away.

Ah. Yeah, that's a little frustrating

@AlexisKing nothing discourages that except... Nothing. No voting, no answering, no commenting, no feedback of any kind.

Hell-ban.

@AlexisKing I'd say especially typo questions. It's so annoying to see someone get +25 rep for "You forgot a semicolon on line 3".

@Shog9 Closing questions at least prevents people from getting answers. That’s better than nothing, no?

@AlexisKing it's better if the question would be problematic if answered. That is, if the answer would be bad.

It's not very likely to discourage the asker though.

@hichris123 I have considered just giving up and answering terrible questions, but I cannot even bring myself to do it.

Folks love the term "help vampire" but forget to read the article that introduced it

@AlexisKing Take the high road. ;)

@Shog9 I wasn’t even aware it was a well-defined term. Forgive me if I am using it wrong, but I am using it with what I understood its colloquial definition to be.

What if closing a question within the first x minutes of its life made reputation act as if the answers had been deleted?

@Shog9 Isn't that the whole point of the rolling rate-limits?

Keep showing the answers, but people don't get to keep rep for them if they're score < 3 (just like deleted answers)

slash7.com/2006/12/22/vampires

@hichris123 YES!

And y'know what makes those happen quicker'n anything?

DOWNVOTING!

A spoon full of downvoting makes the medicine go down...

or not. A downvote or two doesn't seem to trigger it quick enough.

@Undo The more I think about this... it might actually work. Attack the problem at the source; the people who are FGITW answering bad questions

@Shog9 Perhaps make the effects of this more clear to users who never actually experience any of the automatic rate-limiting effects. From my perspective, I see closed questions. I know how they work. I have never been qbanned. The voting retribution system is a black box.

Recent example. Hoping that deleted question got downvotes...

I know we’ve discussed how people use CVs as a “super downvote” and it is obviously subpar, but there is a clear UX reason as to why CVs feel better than downvotes.

@hichris123 -3/+1

This is a psychological problem, not a technical one.

@Undo :/

@AlexisKing yeah... I had this notion that it'd be nice to put a bit of a tag on questions that were identified as problematic. Not exactly like a close banner, more of a "minimum maintenance road, proceed at your own risk" sign.

So you see a question that's downvoted, VLQ-flagged, Triaged, whatever... And it's got this yellow & black sign hanging off of it essentially.

If it gets edited, that'd go away

@Shog9 Even the little fading of downvoted answers is enough to make downvoting of answers feel more weighty. Amusingly, the rep deduction downvoting an answer requires actually makes them feel more weighty.

(baring further feedback)

I am not sure how to make downvoting feel good. I think some improvement could be made to the browsing experience: give me a dashboard of questions to answer, and once I’ve downvoted a question, never show me that question ever again.

@AlexisKing see, that makes sense. Why don't we fade questions that score < threshold?

If you make downvote a “dismiss” button, people will use it much more simply because it has utility to them.

They drop off the homepage, but other than that

Looking at the first question on SO's /questions with answers... that's not a great question, but the OP has been encouraged because they got an answer or two

Yeah, question downvotes go into the void from my perspective as a normal, moderately high-rep user.

Doesn't matter that Martijn closed it in less than ten minutes

They don’t discourage answers, and they don’t otherwise affect the question.

Plus a single upvote counteracts 5 downvotes so the rep deduction is meaningless.

It is infuriating to see people ask horrible question after horrible question and still have 100 rep.

@AlexisKing familiar somehow

The downvoting mechanism barely works from that perspective. People don’t downvote enough because downvoting feels irrelevant.

@404 Ah, fair. The point still applies. Seeing multiple questions that are absolute crap from users with >1 rep makes me feel vengeful.

@Undo that author will now be rate-limited

@404 If only it ran more often. :P

@404 I suppose. But if you get bad questions off the site a week quicker, that's a week less they have to get an answer.

so, there are a lot of other problems there

plenty of crap questions never get answers

@404 There seems to be a systemic problem where people are not downvoting enough. Making score:0.. the default would likely help with that.

but the ones that do often get them really quickly

@AlexisKing have you tried out the experimental filtering UI, btw?

@Shog9 I think so? It seems to have broken websockets for multiple tags for me, though.

hmm

I’ve kinda meant to report that on meta for like 3 months but I never got around to it, mostly because I didn’t care enough.

But it has been annoying.

@AlexisKing Dev time has been allocated to more... "important" projects.

@hichris123 Like the careers jobs integration? /troll

(Seriously, I don’t mind that, but I guess people like to pile on.)

I have wanted access to Documentation since its inception, but no invite so far for me. :(

Oh, right, you missed my "blood and guts"... rant? discussion?

Hmm? I suppose I did?

@404 Fair enough. But the core of the community is Q&A. If the Q&A part falls, the whole system falls down.

@hichris123 Right before I gave up and stopped participating, I wrote a big rant about how the appearance of a democracy on Meta had evaporated. I never finished it, so I never posted it, but I still feel it to some extent. I know it was never really democratic—obviously not—but it felt that way, and that was magical. Now there have been a ton of ill-received posts on meta with very little feedback seemingly taken into account from outward appearances.

I honestly have good faith that the site is doing just fine, and I don’t have any significant worries or resentment. But at times it sure felt like some of the magic was gone.

@hichris123 History suggests that "if" is the wrong word there. It's not even "When the Q&A part falls", it's more "When the Q&A part is sufficiently degraded".

I don’t know. Maybe I was just more naïve and less exhausted then.

@AlexisKing the Time of the Unicorns is indeed long past.

@Shog9 I've been wondering if turnover in a community is actually beneficial. This kind of goes along with what @AlexisKing was saying, it seems like quite a bit of the moderational community is leaving. But is that good? Is it bad to have a bunch of grouchy people who have been on a site for years? Is it good to have turnover because burnout is inevitable?

@hichris123 Turnover tends to be beneficial, yes. Although that's still perhaps a simplistic way of looking at it.

Probably. But I never claimed to understand the nuances of the system. ;P

@hichris123 The “Why is Stack Overflow so negative as of late?” post is incredibly interesting to me. I think it shows how complex that cycle is.

In the same sense that users go, new users arrive.

If you think of a group as having generations, then each "generation" changes what it wants, what it expects from the group. Usually while the previous generation decries their attitude and predicts the downfall of the group.

Sometimes they're right.

Perhaps think of the first generation of SO users as pioneers, hardy souls setting out from the comfort of their forums and such to make what they could of this thing. They had wildly varying ideas of what the thing they were building should become, and lots of them quit within the first 6 months as it became obvious it was going to be something else.

That always surprised me, most of the forums they hail from have "SUPERGOD moderators" and "everyone else"

Stack Exchange takes a massive amount of community feedback

Going back to an environment where there's not really any sounds painful

But at this point, the first generation had built enough infrastructure to enable the second generation to take a different approach: let's call it the settling and civilization period. Meta was built, common guidelines emerged, usage patterns for things like editing and closing were established.

Then... Hey, it turns out The West is pretty nice if you can get past the mountains without having to eat each other. So the third generation is immigrants. They weren't so focused on building things or demarcating the edges of civilization so much as they just wanted to be a part of this new paradise, and grab a little piece for their own.

Now I'm kinda curious what the Donner Party of SO was...

Which generation are we in now?

The one where everyone thinks the world's going to end?

@hichris123 That’s every generation.

Eh. It's off and on.

@Quill Now the land-grab is over. So we got folks looking to be pioneers heading off past the horizon and folks who've been here since the early days jealously guarding their territory and a bunch of folks who sort of just see this whole thing as permanent. We got a bunch of bourgeoisie to try & find housing for, not that they'll really appreciate it, and it's kinda dawning on us all that we need a lot more infrastructure if this thing isn't going to implode on itself.

Meanwhile wondering what those new pioneers are up to, and if we wouldn't be better off following them...

Most of the pioneers will walk the earth and find there's not much more to be conquered

Mars is much kewler.

There's always more. Just gotta kick the folks on it off first. They weren't really using it anyway.

@Shog9 That last bit is interesting. In the past few months I was thinking about how long SO (and all of SE, really) is going to last. For some reason it’s seemed like a company that was so important that it never really seemed like it would go away, but all things eventually pass. It seems like SO has a long lifespan yet, but it no longer feels like the bastion of self-moderating beauty that it once did to me. Perhaps that was simply my perception shifting rather than actual change, though.

Also—I just got an error in chat that my message was too long. Since when was this a thing?!

By the way, that rambling was just a way to stall y'all while I searched for this article that @Ana put my way a while back: hbr.org/2013/10/…

@AlexisKing ages. Put a linebreak in it...

@Shog9 Ohhh, that was it. I wonder how I never ran into that before??

You never had a long discussion with Shog before.

@hichris123 I think I did, but I put linebreaks in it. ;)

Ugh am I the only one having chat issues?

nope

@hichris123 Nope, I just got disconnected, too.

Where's the wheel of blame bot when you need it?

@404 It's hichris123's fault.

Not that one. >.>

I seriously waited for months for the Smokey to blame bjb so I could respond with “tpu”.

But it never happened, and thus my dreams were crushed.

!!/blame

@hichris123 It's 404's fault.

There we go.

@404 I was thinking of the one in internal chatrooms.

why would you want to

it's not public info, no