Proposal to make close votes scale with rep

Question

There have been several proposals for how we’re ever going to get a handle on the ever-mounting close-vote queue. Dupehammer has been especially successful, and there have been several proposals since Mjölnir for awarding more close votes one way or the other, including one to give extra close votes, only accessible via /review and one to have a closehammer.

Here is a simple proposal to grant more close votes without any fancy logic.

Proposal:

We should make close votes scale the way delete votes scale. Currently, you are granted 5 delete votes with the privilege, and then 1 more per 1,000 reps up to a maximum of 30 per UTC day.

With close votes, upon reaching the privilege you are granted 24 on most sites and 50 on large sites. But then—nada.

I propose that close votes be made to scale the same way that delete votes do. Your initial award should be same as the current one (24 or 50), but then you would be granted another close vote for every 1,000 reps past that.

Providing for voter fatigue

This sliding daily maximum should probably top out at some reasonable maximum so that Jon Skeet doesn’t end up spending all his time close voting instead of answering. We’d never get to 100,000,000 answers that way.

But to what maximum? More than it is now, perhaps 50 for sites getting below 50 questions per day on average or 100 for those getting above that.

Maybe.

See, I don't know for sure that it makes sense to have a different maximum for large sites than for small sites. Even though I'm sure the 24/50 split must have been triggered by something, I wonder whether it would be good enough just having more close voters as a large site would and have the maximum be the same everywhere, whatever that number is.

Don't worry about the details

The proposed figures given above are all just wags; it doesn't exactly matter what they all are. Maybe the initial award should be 20, or maybe the max by 100 and 200, or 40 and 80. That doesn’t matter. The important idea is that this be made something which scales with rep.

_Postscript

Something vaguely like this has been proposed before, but only in an answer and only roughly. That suggestion was “chunkier”, and had no upper limit for Trusted Users. This one is more fine-tuned to smaller steps, the way delete-votes work.

Answer 1

I support this idea. I'm one of the highest-rep users on EL&U, and I vote to close when I see bad questions. But currently I stay away from the queue for two reasons:

1. There are simply too many questions now that need closing. I look at the mile-high mountain of crap in the queue and then at the tiny little shovel I have, and I wonder what good it would do just to burn all my close votes and still have most of the mountain yet to shovel.

2. On the occasions when I do burn through all my close votes, invariably I run across something really, really awful that I wish I could vote to close. But no can do.

Both circumstances make me cross.

Edited to add a third category

3. The queue gives you questions in no particular order. If I were able to look over all the questions and choose the worst for closing, I might feel different about this. But since I might potentially spend my votes on the shallower end of the pool and have nothing left by the time I reach the deep end, I am forced for prudency's sake to conserve, and therefore to close questions in the wild instead of the queue. Yeah, I know, mixed metaphor. They happen.

A Little Extra

I just realized I have 30 delete votes on EL&U, but only 24 close votes. That seems strange. Surely delete votes should be rationed more carefully than close votes?

Answer 2

TL;DR

(Access to the close queue should remain at 3 k reputation.)

Motivation

Let me begin with quoting two of Shog’s comments¹²:

So the funny thing with that is that very few people use all their close votes, and almost no one uses them all regularly... But a fair number of people still hit them occasionally. So there's a big problem increasing the number of votes in response to voting (which is what was proposed there) in that you're not reducing frustration for folks who only need a lot of votes occasionally but you are encouraging burnout for the folks who are already at risk for that... Kinda counter-productive either way.

 

this is what close voting looks like pretty much everywhere - there are variations, but there's no site where the right edge of the graph approaches the magnitude of the left. As frustrating as this is daily for a few people on a few sites, in practice it simply doesn't matter to most close voters on most days. That doesn't mean it isn't possible (or wise) to reduce the frustration for those few people... but that should be what we set out to do then; anything else will only lead to further disappointment.

As apparently a lot of people are willing to cast a few close votes per day, a better way to tackle big close queues would be to increase the number of people that have some close votes to begin with. Have the number of close votes increase with reputation (as the question suggests) but instead of starting with 24/50 at 3 k, end there.

Users without the close privilege can only flag closeworthy posts they encounter in the close or low-quality queue (similarly for Triage and H&I, AFAIK). By giving them a few close votes, a little bit more weight is put on their reviewing work and they can slowly familiarise themselves with the close privilege. Something similar applies to medium-reputation users who just monitor/browse a site/tag.

By slowly increasing the amount of close votes, possible abuse by users with lower reputation (i.e., less trust) is limited and responsibility increases gradually with reputation.

Proposal

• Give a small number of close votes (say, three) to users who acquire the access review queues privilege (500 reputation on graduated sites).
• Increase that number of close votes continuously until 24/50 at 3 k reputation.
• Do not grant the access to close and reopen queues before 3 k reputation.

Optional: Making things complicated

I am aware that keeping things simple is a central desire, but here are a few more complicated ways to address possible concerns, in particular in respect to abuse:

• Do not allow more than two close votes on a question from users with less than 3 k reputation.

• Allow access to these close votes only from the review queues.

• Make the whole feature hidden, i.e., do not change the interface in any way, but count closure flags from users with less than 3 k reputation as close votes (if they have close votes left for that day).

Answer 3

Make votes cast on tags where there are relevant tag badges only cost a fractional part of the vote pool for a user.

• A close/reopen vote cast by someone with a relevant silver tag badge costs 0.75x votes
• A close/reopen vote cast by someone with a relevant gold tag badge costs 0.50x votes
• A close/reopen vote cast by someone with a close/reopen vote reviewer badge costs 0.9x (in the queue only?)
• A close/reopen vote cast by someone with a close/reopen vote steward badge costs 0.75x (in the queue only?)

If someone has a gold tag badge and silver reviewer badge, votes within that tag would only cost 0.45 votes.

This acts as an outright grant for people with the close and reopen vote queue badges. Also gives the people who are active within a given tag more ability to cast votes within that tag.

While not extremely significant, it gives a few more close votes each day. Furthermore, since this works with the existing 5 votes to close, it is easier to tweak the cost factors (compared to other proposals elsewhere to increase the vote strength and leading to possible inconsistency of tallied votes at a later time).

Answer 4

Wrzlprmft's recommendation is interesting. I'd suggest the following modified form:

1. Start with a single close vote at 1000 points, when the user becomes an "established user".

2. Add a single close vote for every 100 points, until 2900 points, when the user will have 20 close votes.

3. At 3000 points, give access to the close queue plus 5 close votes. (Total votes: 25)

4. Thereafter, add close votes at a different rate. (Should it be faster? Slower?)

Another idea:

• At some number of points, allow multiple close votes on a single question, but max of 3 votes for a single question by a single user. Votes may be added one at a time or all at once. This way, questions that clearly should be closed aren't left open after getting stuck at 4 close votes. Also, abuse would be somewhat limited because at least two people would be required to agree to close the question.

• For a question with less than five users voting to close (if multiple votes per question is allowed), then at least 6 votes are required to close. Examples:

  • 1,1,1,1,1 ⇒ 5 votes, 5 people ⇒ close
  • 2,1,1,1 ⇒ 5 votes, but only 4 people ⇒ need one more vote
  • 2,2 ⇒ 4 votes, 2 people ⇒ need two more votes
  • 2,2,2 ⇒ 6 votes, 3 people ⇒ close
  • 3,2 ⇒ 5 votes, 2 people ⇒ need one more vote

  • 3,3 ⇒ 6 votes, 2 people ⇒ close

  • 1,1,1,1 ... ?
    ⇒ a new voter can add one vote (1,1,1,1,1);
    ⇒ existing voters can add two more votes (3,1,1,1) or (2,2,1,1)

• This basically amounts to...

  if (votes >= 6) or (voters >= 5); then close

Answer 5

If the queue size fluctuates wildly it may be more convenient to simply let people "borrow" their close votes from tomorrow's or next week's vote allowance:

1. I don't think that empowering fewer users with more privileges is better than broadening the base of actively moderating users.
2. Not every community is like SO/ELU/Maths. These are the big critters in the Stack Exchange zoo, others have much lower queue and community sizes.

Answer 6

How about we just ban new questions from <5k rep users until this is sorted out?

Then, with a clean slate, open it back up again whilst coming down hard on off-topic posts using the dupehammer and a closehammer feature, to stop the queue getting out of control in the future?

I'm serious!