Empowering tag-badge holders part II - let's look at silver?

Question

Not long ago, we gave folks that have a gold tag badge the ability to instantly mark a question as a duplicate of another. This has worked out exceptionally well in practice. While there have been some disputed closings, the process is completely transparent and community oversight has worked just as everyone expected. These abilities have allowed people very vested in their tags to just take care of them, and I wonder why we didn't try it sooner.

Preface - nothing is currently planned, I'm just hoping to get some feedback and ideas.

I want to extend the concept of badge-based privileges to the silver level, and the best opportunity to do that is to once again look at tag badges. While they aren't extraordinarily difficult to earn, silver tag badges typically indicate that you've got more than a bit of knowledge to share in the topic, have spent quite a bit of time on the site sharing it, and know the content in your tag reasonably well. In fact, let's look at the criteria:

You must have a total score of 400 in at least 80 non-community wiki answers

Giving these folks extra privileges, or advance access to standard privileges within the tags where they have these badges seems like a good idea. Initially, I thought of the tag wiki system - wouldn't it be great to show more folks that those exist by suddenly telling them that they have magical powers within them? Well, as it turns out, if you've got silver badges, you already have these abilities from rep alone.

So, silver-badge holders - what would make your time on the site more productive than it currently is if you had access to it? There are some things I'd like to avoid:

• 'Extra weights' in current privileges. E.g. having your vote count as two instead of one. This is way too difficult to implement, and way too complicated to explain to someone new.

• Short-circuiting of community oversight. E.g. being able to instantly approve tag synonyms where you have a silver badge in one of the tags. Mistakes here could be costly, and not surface for quite a while. Some things simply need a few keys turned in order to happen.

The real beauty of the gold badge privilege is that it sort of just turns itself on when a site needs it the most. By the time you have a dozen people with gold tag badges, you've probably got your fair share of duplicates to manage as well.

I've had a diamond next to my name since early 2011. While I'm well aware of what privileges get unlocked at what level, it's nearly impossible for me to just use the site as someone that has a few of these. While I don't see much opportunity to extend this to the bronze level, I really think we could do something at the silver level, I just wish I could put my finger on it.

How could we make keeping this place awesome easier for you in that way?

Answer 1

Following dupehammer spirit, it looks natural to give them 10-20 ^{see details below} extra close votes to bang in their tag. Note how this will also boost dupehammer holders power, allowing them to do their magic 10-20 more times a day.

Another option worth considering is to allow for 10-20 extra close reviews in their tag. Primary purpose of this is promoting use of filtering in reviews (awareness of which still seems to be an issue). But this also takes into account that reviewing in familiar tag is expected to go easier.

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A more nuanced breakdown and explanation of the feature (hat tip to Tim Post): 15-20 extra votes (reviews) to silver badge holders, 5 - to bronze...

...perhaps 5 at the bronze level, so people can actually do stuff right away. Then perhaps 15 more at the silver level, which becomes even more useful when you hit gold and unlock the other ability. When folks hit the bronze level, the extra votes will almost always come on the heels of unlocking another privilege just through rep, so this could be a really good way of bringing out even more enthusiasm for that achievement as well.

Worth noting how this is expected to impact smaller sites where typically gold tag badges are too rare for dupehammer to make a significant effect, but silver and bronze ones are more widespread.

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^{A relatively minor (but still, interesting) design challenge for such a feature would be how to handle questions retagged after the vote was cast. Do we keep counting these in "tag quota" or remove from it? Personally I would be inclined to keep - first, because it looks simpler to specify and implement (other way we'd have to handle ugly corner cases, like what if tag was edited out and added back later) and second, because it looks like less prone to complaints ("hey 10 questions in my tag that I voted in the morning were later all retagged and now I am out of votes at all, that's so unfair").}

^{Another interesting challenge would be, how to handle "daily tag limit" data and respective UI for users who have both silver and bronze badges in different tags. (Easy solution for UI would probably be to report amount of "tag close votes" used instead of ambiguous remaining amount.)}

Answer 2

I don't need to be given more opportunities to take the garbage out (e.g. more votes) but I would sure like to feel like I'm not working in vain.

In the queues, give priority to the the votes or flags cast by people who have silver badges (or higher) in one of the tags of the post. For instance, let's say I'm filtering close votes to only see those in javascript and there are 10 questions with votes from people who do not have a badge in the topic and 2 from people with gold or silver badges in javascript, these 2 should be prioritized over the 10 until the 2 are out of the queue. Of course, the more votes from silver and gold badge holders, the more the question would be prioritized relative to other questions.

Answer 3

Well, as it turns out, if you've got silver badges, you already have these abilities from rep alone.

On Stack Overflow:

• 5018 users have at least one silver tag badge
• 3120 of these have less than 20k reputation
• 1193 less than 10k
• 10 less than 5k
• 4 less than 4k

More than half the silver tag badge holders don't have the 20k privilege of editing tag wikis without supervision (which includes improving tag wiki suggested edits — on sites where I have between 5k and 20k rep, I'm often frustrated by seeing ok-but-improvable suggested edits that I can't improve). We should at least give them that privilege.

I'd like to extend that privilege to related lower-volume tags, but I have no idea how to define related here.

I don't think the other 10k/15k/20k privileges make much sense on a tag basis. Deletion might, but I'm wary of making it available to users who might have deep technical knowledge but not necessarily much experience of moderation.

As having unsupervised edition privilege on one tag is not much, and about half the users concerned would have that privilege anyway, this should be combined with some other ability.

Answer 4

What about, in the spirit of the dupehammer, allow silver badge holders to have a binding reject vote on suggested edits in their tags?

Answer 5

Let silver tag badge holders vote to delete negatively-scored answers in their tags.

Give them that 20K privilege early, in other words. It's very possible to get a silver tag badge a good long while before hitting 20K. For holders with 20K or more, give them a few extra delete votes in their tags.

It would still require consensus to remove an answer (both from the need for several votes and the negative post score requirement), and answers can be undeleted without too much of a hassle, since 10K+ users will see any abuse. This would also help non-answers be removed more quickly.

Answer 6

I think it would be confusing for a lot of people to have silver dupe hammers which were worth 2, 3, or 4 votes instead of 1 or 5. I have no problem allowing silver badge holders to close a duplicate with one swing of the hammer. However, if the team doesn't want to try that, I suggest giving gold badgers a rec and unclear hammer.

So if a gold badger votes to close a question as unclear what you're asking or recommend or find a book, tool, software library, tutorial or other off-site resource, then the question should be hammered close.

Why give gold badgers a hammer for unclear what you're asking?

Because if a gold badge holder in a tag doesn't know what the heck the questioner is asking then is anyone else going to really be able to produce a good answer to the unclear question? So these questions should be closed as soon as possible, and reopened once improved to an acceptable level.

Why give gold badgers a hammer for tool/recommendation questions?

Because they attract spam, link only answers, low quality answers, not even to mention it's off-topic to ask such a question. So these questions should be closed as soon as possible, and reopened if the questioner can remove the offending remarks and create an acceptable question.

Answer 7

Just an idea, not sure if it's practical or not:

Silver Badges: For duplicates, a vote counts as 4, which means another vote is required to support the decision, this will minimize the wrong closing for duplicates.

Gold Badges: In addition to the duplicate closing, the Broad Questions closing as well. This is easily spotted by experts in tags.

Answer 8

I originally suggested this here, but it's related to this too.

Give people with tag badges some extra votes in their tags. Presumably, we look mostly at stuff there, but also venture outside once in a while. Say, a bronze badge earns an extra 5 votes, silver 10, and gold 20.

Answer 9

We get a lot of posts that are just obvious crap, but it takes too long to deal with them, certainly on the smaller sites. Therefore, I propose two things for silver (and by extension, gold badge holders):

1. Their close votes should not count against their total for the day if the question has a score of -3 or below (preferably computed retroactively, e.g. the CV would be refunded if the score drops) in their tag.
   • This would encourage more downvoting of terrible questions, which many people don't bother to do.
2. Silver badge holders with at least 10k rep should be able to use their delete votes on questions in their tag with no time threshold.

Silver badge holders know what's truly garbage in their tag. Let's help them to deal with it more effectively.

Answer 10

Make close votes by silver badge holders take a lot longer to time out, and to be shown in the close review queue more often.

Answer 11

Let silver-badge holders have the dupehammer.

There are a couple of cross-network benefits:

1. It works on smaller sites where not many people have a gold badge
2. It works in smaller tags where not many people have a gold badge

On the larger sites only, this would make a huge difference in helping keep the site "clean".

The risk is that a sliver badge holder closes something erroneously. However, there are still gold badge holders able to re-open (and close again!) if necessary. For those tags where there are no gold badge holders then the person with the silver badge is already the authority on the subject.

If there are genuine disputes then the community and moderators are both still able to re-open in the usual manner.

As a silver badge holder may not be trusted as much as a gold badge holder and on smaller sites and in smaller tags there are less questions you could restrict the number of dupe-hammer votes to floor(close votes / 2) (or similar). I don't think it's necessary...

Answer 12

I would suggest allowing silver badge holders to convert answers in their tags to comments. They have demonstrated a very good understanding of their topic, so they should be able to tell which answers answer the question, and which "answers" contain useful information, but don't answer the question, and are better off as comments.

Answer 13

I really liked the direction you took with the dupehammer idea. It was a brilliant interpretation of a rather broad original idea.

In my opinion it helped to solve an existing problem, and as a result there was a good niche established.

To now step back and also include silver tag badge users in this process is a little harder to see in my opinion. I looked around for a decent amount of time at different types of privileges, features, modifications, etc. which could be granted to silver (and above) tag badge holders but couldn't find much that they probably do not already have.

In all honesty, most users who have a silver badge in one tag probably have a large amount of reputation from other tags as well. 400 votes in a single badge is 4000 reputation, and as pointed out by some numbers from @Gilles 60% of these users have 20k rep already.

It is possible that granting any privilege "early" to these users will not even have much of an impact since they already have access to it.

For example, it could be nice to view deleted posts in the tag you hold a silver badge for. On the other hand, so many of these users already have this ability, it may not be that much of a bonus.

When examining the list of users with silver badges, it does seem there are still not that many of them. For example, in the most popular tag in the entire exchange, Java, there are 833 silver tag badge holders. There are only 284 gold tag badge holders. Does extending the hammer to include those ~800 make sense? I am not sure (perhaps @Shog9 knows more - his analysis is stellar).

As for other extensions, I guess I cannot think of any. I like some of the proposals here, such as the increased voting totals for review which seems helpful, but overall (and hoping not to jinx anything) things seem to be running kind of smooth at the moment.

Answer 14

(The following would be useful for active bountiers and active meta users, and will help moderation, of course)

Users having a silver tag badge can be given close powers and editing privileges regardless of their reputation. This would be very fair because silver tag badge is awarded for 400 points and 80 answers, which means that this user could earn 4k rep for answers in this tag.

Answer 15

Possibly having silver badge on some tag should allow close-voting on the question initially having the tag multiple times (if the question gets reopened)?

Answer 16

If a silver badge holders casts a close vote, make “community” also cast the same vote.

Answer 17

Another idea: Silver Badge holders should have the ability to vote to delete / convert to comment "Not an Answer" flags. It would work similar to close votes - with 3 "Not an answer" votes, these users would handle the flag and take the appropriate action on the answer. (I originally wrote 5 votes, but then I realized that silver tag badges are rare enough that it might be really difficult to get 5 votes).

There could also be a review queue for these answers - the only ones that would show up in your particular queue would be ones for which you have a silver badge in that tag.

Answer 18

I want to extend the concept of badge-based privileges to the silver level, and the best opportunity to do that is to once again look at tag badges.

...

So, silver-badge holders - what would make your time on the site more productive than it currently is if you had access to it? There are some things I'd like to avoid:

• 'Extra weights' in current privileges. E.g. having your vote count as two instead of one. This is way too difficult to implement, and way too complicated to explain to someone new.

• Short-circuiting of community oversight. E.g. being able to instantly approve tag synonyms where you have a silver badge in one of the tags. Mistakes here could be costly, and not surface for quite a while. Some things simply need a few keys turned in order to happen.

The Silver Tag Badge could appear next to the buttons in the Review Queue, it wouldn't do anything except Reviewers could easily click on it and determine if they feel knowledgeable about the subject (whether they possess such a badge or not).

This would hint the Reviewer that a silver tag badged user was one of the persons whom contributed to the question or answer entering the queue. It would allow the Badge to have more weight but not remove humans from the decision making process.

This wouldn't be "way too complicated" either, click it for more information or ignore it. If it was deemed necessary a snackbar (formally called toast) message could explain the changes.

Example:

I've had a diamond next to my name since early 2011. While I'm well aware of what privileges get unlocked at what level, it's nearly impossible for me to just use the site as someone that has a few of these. While I don't see much opportunity to extend this to the bronze level, I really think we could do something at the silver level, I just wish I could put my finger on it.

As shown above, if Mjölnir owners could turn the hammer off they could cast non-hammer-votes, and just use the site as a lower reputation user (to solicit more opinions).

The gold, silver, and bronze badges could be displayed in the Moderator Tools next to each flagged post, that would assist people without interdisciplinary expertise to decide if they should visit the post and cast a deciding vote. They would be clickable for more information and serve to indicate the confidence of the flag. There are no "new users" involved and snackbars could be handed out as explained above.

Example:

I believe that proposal addresses all your concerns.

Answer 19

My suggestion is more general.

I sometimes see a post protected by a moderator that frustrates me. I don't know much about the post protection system, but I don't think it's voted on atm.

I simply propose that users with a silver badge can vote to protect or remove protection on posts with tags that they are knowledgeable about. This would take more burden away from the moderators, and introduce a more democratic procedure to the protection system. Additionally, silver badge holders should be some of the best users to decide whether a post needs to be protected or not.

Answer 20

I have a different suggestion - (to) Allow silver and gold badge holders to downvote answers on questions with the tag without the -1 reputation penalty. Since silver and gold badge holders scores enough to sufficiently prove their knowledge, they should be trusted to be sane enough to cast downvotes correctly in those fields.

Answer 21

I'd like to add a point of caution here: as with many privileges, it's important to make sure you don't give people access to them too early.

A silver tag badge is easier to gain than you might think, and doesn't necessarily require a wide knowledge of the subject area. There's at least one case of a user having >400 (as of the time of writing, 574) net upvotes and >80 (as of the time of writing, 91) non-community-wiki answers on a single question. As such, any tags placed on that question will automatically give the user in question the corresponding silver tag badge (assuming that the tag itself is eligible for tag badges). I don't think answers to a single question, impressive though they are (they got those 574 upvotes for a reason), can demonstrate much about the knowledge of the tag more generally (the user will probably be an expert in one of the tags in question, but the others might well be incidental).

I'm finding it hard to think of a privilege which is cosmetic enough that it could safely be awarded in this sort of situation. (Of course, we could treat this similarly to brand new users who got moderation tools as a consequence of claiming a bounty, but those users tend not to be able to use the tools correctly either; I know that I ended up misusing moderation tools quite a bit early on due to gaining the reputation for them before I really understood how the site worked.)