Automatically delete old closed questions, regardless of question score

Question

According to https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/92006/141361, we automatically delete old question with negative/0/1 scores (depending on time passed) and no answers.

I'd like to suggest extending something like that to closed questions as well.

In general, closed questions with no good answers are bad for the Internet, because they represent a dead-end page; a page with a question and no good answers, and it can never receive any other answers as well. If anyone ever Googles for that, all they get is a useless page. A useless page with our branding.

I propose to automatically delete these questions, to make the Internet a better place. My proposed criteria:

If a question is more than 30 days old, and ...

• It is closed (except if it's closed as duplicate)
• It has no answers (or if we feel more strict: it has no answers with score 0 or more)

... it will be automatically deleted.

The big difference from the policies linked in the other post is that now the question score doesn't matter - the reasoning is that, again, if it's closed and unanswered it's a Bad Thing, no matter how it is scored.

Notice - I don't just propose it to deal with a theoretical problem, I have noticed quite a few closed questions get upvotes (e.g. "cool" questions that are closed because they are prohibited by site policies). If would be great if those won't require manual cleanup later.

EDIT: according to the data found by Conrad and posted below, we might have thousands of these dead-end questions with over a million views between them, on SO alone.

Answer 1

I like this. The grace period allows people to turn a question around while helping to automate the janitorial process.

If the site as a whole (and this applies to the owner as well) doesn't have the time/inclination to try and improve the question (which doesn't have anything good in the way of answers already) to the point where it can attract/be good content, then there's no reason we should keep it around.

The only side effect I can see of this which might be detrimental is that it might stop people from casting delete votes for obvious content, thinking "oh, it will get cleaned up automatically". I think we have to make sure that's not the only impact and if it is, how much of an impact it really is and if this justifies that impact.

Answer 2

Once you remove the 0 score questions (ones that are going to be deleted anyway within a year) we are left with a measly 2153 questions it's really just a drop in the ocean.

I do not support automatically deleting anything that got a bunch of upvotes and views, the list is tiny and the community can easily work through this - I do not want another deletapocalypse.

So, the main question we are left with is: should we be deleting closed "0 vote" questions more aggressively than we do general unanswered 0 vote questions (happens after a year).

The beauty of the current system is that it is easy to explain. I worry about adding such a rule ... it would also need a bunch of complicated sub-rules like

1. no active re-open votes
2. not flicking from closed to open to closed.
3. not a migration stub (that gets nuked anyway)
4. not merged

I do not find the large amount of complexity this introduces is worth the gain of removing 8000 questions. Keep in mind, when questions are closed they are often negatively voted so they get cleaned earlier.

Answer 3

Let me just say that sometimes questions without answers are very useful!

Ah I'm not the only one who had this problem!… and we both use ⟨insert crappy software/distribution/hardware/whatever here⟩, so the issue is probably due to this and not to this!

Answer 4

Updates based on comment

Here's the list of questions that meet your criteria. There are 10,654 of them. Many of them have been merged, deleted (due to the existing sweep) or migrated.

Even if we remove merged and migrated posts its still 10,072. While this only represents .38% of all questions, this does represent 1,216,070* views of bad pages.

Removing these pages does make the internet better and is a worthwhile pursuit.

*StackExchange has a very conservative view count. Its likely to be 3x this.

Answer 5

"Automatically delete" is a bad idea. It's a doubly bad idea to delete content that the majority of voters find useful.

Let's work through a test case:

1. User taras.roshko asked a question about the .NET source code. (Aug 30 '11 at 10:13)
2. User Marc Gravell♦ commented with an answer to the implied programming question. (Aug 30 '11 at 10:21)
3. User casperOne♦ commented that the actual question could not be answered as only the .NET developers have access to the information. (Aug 30 '11 at 13:44)
4. The question was "closed as not constructive by casperOne♦, Will♦ Aug 30 '11 at 14:38"

Therefore the total time the question had to collect answers was 4 hours and 25 minutes. If Marc had answered instead of commented (not that he should have) the question would be safe. But since nobody decided to provide feedback in the form of an answer, this question would be deleted under the proposal.

What the proposal must show is that the internet would be a better place without this particular question than with it. And the evidence shows that 13 people thought the question was good and nobody thought it was bad—just not answerable at the moment. In my opinion, closed with no answers is the perfect end state for this question and it currently provides a small, but not valueless artifact for future Googlers.

---

As programmers, we don't like unanswerable questions. But the reality is that there are many questions that are legitimately without answer. These are not really good fit for the sort of site that StackExchange hosts. An answer form Joe Programmer to the above question will be speculative rather than authoritative. That's why it makes perfect sense to close these questions. Why encourage people to make guesses?

But not being a good fit for the site does not mean that a question ought to be deleted. In fact the site benefits by communicating to users:

1. That a question will not likely be answered on the site, and
2. Why the question was closed.

At least this way there's a chance that askers of duplicate questions will avoid asking.

On Stack Overflow, at least, many of the questions really ought to be migrated to where they might get answers or at least the right audience. Some questions in Conrad's query ought to be migrated to Super User, Server Fault, TeX.SE, etc.

---

Finally, the proposal does not mesh well with what I understand is the current protocol for deletion. This is not a technical problem, but a social one. A technical solution at best will clear the way toward a true social solution.

In this case, automatic deletion merely hides or delays the problem. Is that really the way we want to proceed in the future? Do we need to make the same mistakes again in order to learn from them?