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Shog9

7:31 PM

@Catija ok, couple of things here...

First of all, I think it's really important to recognize the value in allowing folks to "save face"

We tend to overlook that sometimes, particularly in the face of just how much stuff SE makes public to anyone

...but... It's a huge motivator / demotivator

For an example, look at how irritated folks get at not being able to edit posts on Twitter

EVERYONE makes stupid mistakes, and when you can't fix that - when your mistake gets quoted and passed around - it's humiliating and makes you hate the system.

We allow editing, but more than that we allow grace period edits that silently apply... Purely to serve that need to save face.

We also allow deletion, and go well out of our way to avoid rubbing your face in the stuff you've deleted... Or had deleted for you.

This is a delicate balancing act, sometimes. You don't want to confuse folks; if I think I've done something and the system implies I haven't, I get confused. I stop trusting the system... Or worse, stop trusting my own perception.

The easy solution is to just give up and make everything visible. But that falls apart really quickly for the reasons described above.

So we soldier on

Now... This is where the relevance of self-deleted posts come into play. Given the opportunity and the awareness that they've made a grievous faux pas, most folks would just as soon delete their mistake and be done with it. And in fact, many, many people do exactly that.

The value of stuff like canned comments in review isn't really so much about letting folks know why their post is being deleted or downvoted, it's about letting them know that they've inadvertently made themselves look foolish... And a good many people take that opportunity to correct the problem before anyone else has a chance to.

But... not everyone hangs around after posting. Or understands their mistake. Or is able to admit to mistakes. Or knows how to find the "delete" link.

So it's really critical that we remove these posts before they get driven into the ground by passing voters / commenters / the OP / etc.

Not just because it makes the site look better, although long-term it does have a pretty massive effect there.

But because it gives folks a chance to move on, to save face.

Shadow Wizard

All of this is about the canned review comments?

Shog9

That's why - in review - we don't just rely on 20K users to delete answers. Anyone with editing privileges can "recommend" deletion, and the post will still get deleted. Quietly. Without prejudice.

That's also why it works. Even though it's a "weak" deletion state, and the system doesn't prevent the author from just undeleting and moving on... Most folks don't want to.

Yes, we allow it - and in some cases that's a very valuable method of correction - but it's rarely used, even when the author does want to post an answer they'll often just post a new one instead of editing and undeleting.

πάντα ῥεῖ

There's still also roomba, which lets these go away silently.

Shadow Wizard

@πάνταῥεῖ it's only for questions, not answers.

πάντα ῥεῖ

OK

Shadow Wizard

7:44 PM

I think the discussion here is mainly about answers? Not sure yet...

Shog9

Second thing...

The auto-comments

Stack Overflow hits about 87% of LQ-review-deleted answers with an auto-comment

Math, 75%

Ask Ubuntu, 85%

Of course, Stack Overflow deleted about 84K answers in the last year via LQ review, while Math & AU combined deleted about 3K

Interpersonal skills... Only gets auto-comments on about 45% of LQ-review deleted answers

But that's not a very useful comparison, since IPs is a very small site and has only been really active in deleting answers via LQ review for a few months

πάντα ῥεῖ

All about scaling

Shog9

Politics, 54%

Catija

@Shog9 But none of this is in your answer... there's no social reasoning in either of your answers to that FR... both of your answers focus on technical concerns/solutions.

Shog9

Chess, 55

Puzzling, 59

Gardening, 100

Shadow Wizard

7:51 PM

What auto comment? The comment we choose when reviewing and choosing to delete?

Shog9

@Catija what FR?

@ShadowWizard yeah

Catija

@Shog9 But we also very rarely actually delete answers because they're new questions or comments or... the other reasons. We delete them because they aren't supported... so most of those auto comments don't apply.

18

A: Answers deleted via Recommend Deletion votes in review should not be undeletable by the answerer

Jarrod has implemented animuson's suggestion: Now that we have that new "disputed low quality review" flag, can we use it for this purpose? The OP undeleting their answer is like disputing the reviewers, so whenever this happens, why not raise an auto-flag so that a moderator can take a peek ...

Shog9

@Catija That was... 4 years ago. There's a bit of history...

When we first envisioned LQ review, we had this idea that ONLY 20K reviewers would actually delete anything.

Low-rep reviewers would just add signal to stuff, prioritizing it for the 20K reviewers.

...that... was extremely optimistic.

In practice, there were waaaaay too many posts that needed to be deleted and waaaay too few 20K reviewers for that to work.

Shadow Wizard

Back in the days where we had 10k rep user's flag queue?

Catija

All I'm trying to understand is why one OP can undelete their answer over six members of the community without any review and with only a moderator being able to resolve it.

Shog9

7:57 PM

Yeah - LQ rolled out initially as a partial replacement for that - the flag queue still existed, but auto-flagged and then later LQ-flagged posts went into review as well as the 10K queue and the mod flag queue

if that sounds complicated and ineffectual, that's because it was

We realized it almost immediately - stuff was just piling up in LQ review and the mods were handling it anyway.

So we decided to give some teeth to those "recommendations"

...but... there wasn't any real precedent for that, beyond Spam flags

And someone posting "I have this problem too" isn't quite the same level of severity as spam

So we kinda just made it up as we went along: 6 recommendations to delete (like spam...) but no locking, no rep penalty*, etc.

Originally, it did nothing beyond set the "DeletionDate" column on the post and call it a day

This left us free to go back and do something else if it all went horribly wrong

but amazingly, it mostly worked

So we added some auto-flags to handle the situations where it didn't seem to be working: controversial reviews

(lots of delete votes on an "ok" review, lots of "ok" reviews on a delete-consensus review)

Turned out even those were over-cautious for the most part

After about a year of tweaking various thresholds, reviewers were handling an awful lot of flags, deleting an awful lot of posts, and doing so more conservatively than even the moderators

So that just left this weird deletion state

Now, the obvious fix would've been to remove the mod-lock for Community-attributed deletions and turn review-delete into a normal delete

We ended up doing the former anyway

user393596

@Shog9 I really like your perspective, regarding allowing people to save face, when they make mistakes. I was wondering: what does SE consider its users? In other words, are they "clients" or "the product" of SE? Sometimes I wonder if users are clients, since they are the ones reading the ads on Stack Overflow, for example.

Shog9

I think anthropomorphizing either companies or users are problematic

@Catija essentially this: those 6 users are not trusted to delete stuff

Catija

So, what happens in mixed cases like this where one of the six recommend deletion votes came from someone who can actually delete vote? If the OP undeleted it on their own, would it still have that single delete vote?

But we trust someone with 27 rep to undelete it?

And that undeletion doesn't even cause the post to be bumped so that people can even see it happened... The only thing preventing it from sitting around forever is that mod auto flag.

Also, you just said that they're more cautious about deletions than even the mods are... so we don't trust them but they've proven to actually be pretty careful about using it... that seems like two conflicting statements.

Shog9

@Catija it currently has one delete vote. If it was undeleted, that vote would be cleared. The voter could re-vote to delete in that case.

@Catija I was sloppy with my language. In aggregate, LQ review is more cautious than moderators are (again, in aggregate). Individual reviewers are often less cautious.

Catija

8:14 PM

If it gets cleared when undeleted, what's the benefit of keeping it on file while it is deleted?

Shog9

The danger here is that merely by chance you get n sloppy reviewers on a single post and it gets deleted when it shouldn't be - or not deleted when it should be. There are heuristics for both of those situations that raise a flag.

@Catija that's just how delete votes work. They aren't cleared until/unless the post is undeleted.

(or reopened, in the case of questions)

Delete votes are a lot more like up/down votes than they are like close votes, which don't really work very much like votes at all.

user393596

@Shog9 how come Stack Exchange doesn't do more of what Quora does? When I get my daily emails from them, a lot of the high-quality answers are written by experts that are verified, e.g. a physics professor at Berkeley, a Managing Director at Goldman Sachs. Visibility on Quora seems like a great thing, while here at SE, anonymity of the contributors seems preferable.

Catija

But up/down votes are never cleared unless a negatively scoring question is migrated to another site entirely.

Shog9

@JalapenoNachos different goals

A former co-worker summed it up roughly like this...

these sites have three different audiences: askers, answerers, readers. You gotta kinda pick two to optimize for.

SE optimizes for readers & answerers, in pretty much that order

Catija

Anyway... I know you don't have a ton of time but if you find a few minutes to add some of this to your explanation, I think it's be useful.

Shog9

8:20 PM

Quora optimizes for askers & answerers, again in pretty much that order

Anne Daunted

For a short while (now it's correct again), the main page showed this question having only one answer, although it has two (had them for some hours already). But one of them was edited a min ago. Maybe that's why?

Shog9

@AnneDaunted one of those answers was deleted for a few minutes

Anne Daunted

@Shog9 Thanks! It was back again so quickly.

Shog9

@Catija ask a new question?

Anne Daunted

Silly me - that was the edit. Should've looked it up myself.

Anne Daunted

8:36 PM

and questions with active reopen votes, as well as questions whose bodies have been edited within five days of closing (the "on hold" period), appear in the reopen queue.. But only after the very first edit, like explained on MSO, not subsequent ones?

Catija

8:54 PM

@Shog9 Is this also why there isn't an undelete queue of any sort? Undeletions by the community seem pretty rare since it requires using the 10K tools to even see that there are posts with undelete votes.

@AnneDaunted First edit since closure, regardless of who edits it... I think?

Shog9

@Catija there isn't an undelete queue because we never figured out what should feed it

also... Kinda just ran out of time to work on review

Catija

9:41 PM

0

Q: Why do we let users (of all reputation levels) unilaterally undelete their own posts if deleted from review?

Today on a site I moderate we got a disputed low quality review flag on a post with the reason "Post was undeleted by the author". By the standards of our site, this deletion was entirely valid and the post had a negative score as required for this kind of deletion. The post hadn't been edited si...

... It got a bit longer than I thought it would be initially...

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