Remove question from HNQ if it has close votes

Question

I've seen this a few times in the past few months, where questions that are blatantly off topic are still on the Hot Network Questions list. Great, it has more exposure, and people who are not familiar with the site's rules for what is a good or bad question for the site are voting up or down.

Having questions that are off topic can do one of two things to the site: either new visitors get the wrong idea about what the site is about, or they decide to open a Meta post to ask to change it.

What I propose is that when a question appears on the HNQ list, and there is a vote to close by a couple high-rep users on the parent site, the question is either temporarily removed, or the question is put on the top of the Close Vote queue for that site, to remove it from the list.

Answer 1

I second the general suggestion.

To address the concerns of abuse raised in the comments on the question, I suggest the following criterion:

Do not list questions as hot network questions, if they are currently under review for closing and have two or more close votes.

This way, a single user with sufficient reputation cannot remove a question from the HNQs with a single close vote or flag. Also, if a non-closeworthy HNQ attracts more than one close vote due to the increased attention it receives, it can resume its status after being dequeued from the close queue.

This might still lead to some non-closeworthy questions being temporarily excluded from being an HNQ, but I think this is an acceptable damage. After all, there is no fundamental right on being eligible for HNQ.

Answer 2

Something like this can be implemented with only minor modifications to existing system and with negligible performance overhead:

1. Pick more than 100 "candidate" questions (150... 200... 300). Do it using current way, which is proven to work well and fast enough.

2. Query the picked questions to find out whether some of them match the exclusion criteria - say, have 3 close votes from 10K users etc. This (and all subsequent ones) is constant time operation, since amount of "candidate" questions is fixed.

3. Exclude questions that match the criteria (or scale their hotness score down if you prefer softer / more robust approach).

4. Select top 100 "final" questions for the list from the cleaned candidates.

(Granted, there is chance that too many of the picked questions turn out inappropriate. But in (quite unlikely) case if that happens, this would rather make a food for thought, how come that over 2/3 selected questions are inappropriate, and is it the case that HNQ indeed do more harm than good, and could there be a way to pick less troublesome questions.)

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Side note, they may tell you that you should downvote closeable questions to drop them off the list instead of requesting changes to the system. Just in case if they say so, keep in mind that this is nonsense. Jeff Atwood pointed long time ago that system just doesn't work that way:

it's too addictive and too easy, and in the absence of any moderation, the community would do nothing but add and upvote the easy, fun stuff. This is why community moderators have real power; they need that power to intervene, educate, and refocus the community's exuberance on more substantive content...

Votes down from those who care are easily outnumbered by upvotes from tens or even hundreds careless passers-by brought in from sidebar who just want to be entertained.

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Per discussion in comments under the other answer, an adjustment worth considering is to remove not all the questions with close votes but only those that are currently under close review. This would be more fair because it would allow to account for opinions of those 3K users who are willing to keep question open (these users can drop the question off the review by casting Leave Open votes).

Answer 3

I think this is a bad idea, because the presence of close votes does not mean something is off topic the same way that closing a question does.

For example,

On The Great Outdoors we currently have a question with 4 close votes. However, when it was sent to the review queue, all of the votes were to leave it open and before the comments were cleared, the comment disagreeing with closing had been upvoted 11 times.

There is also a meta post on the question now, and the votes on that all point to leaving it open.

In this case, removing it from the Hot Network Questions list because 4 users think its off topic instead of listening to the majority who think its on topic and vote to leave it open would not be fair.

If 4 close votes were enough to remove it from the list, then what I would do is vote to close, instantly edit and vote to reopen and then send up the bat signal asking other users to reopen. That seems like a lot of unnecessary work and users might get confused as to why their question suddenly dropped off the list.

For any problems it may cause, the Hot Network List helps increase the reputation of users and encourage participation, which in turn will help the site keep on track.

It seems to me that this is trying to solve a different question, off topic questions making onto the list but this isn't going to solve that.

Instead

• Upvote good content so that there are more users who can vote to close.
• Write meta posts clearly stating what is and what is not on topic.
• Keep the site chat active so you can ask other users to vote to close off topic questions.

TLDR: Off topic questions getting onto the list isn't going to be solved by letting a minority of users determine what gets onto it.