Add a way for moderators to cast a normal, non binding close/open vote

Question

I think moderators should have the ability to cast a normal, non binding close and open vote like they were a normal user (while of course retaining their ability to cast a binding vote where necessary).

This can be used in "grey areas" where a moderator can choose to give his or her opinion, but not make a decision alone; a good example of this is Closed for “too localized” and by a single person is a bad decision.

This also helps in areas not so grey (questions that everyone would agree should be closed) since the OP has the time to see close (1) and possibly edit his or her question. The moderator can then optionally come back after a few minutes and close it for real if it's not improved (or maybe during that time other 4 people voted to close it).

This would also fit perfectly in Stack Overflow's official theory of moderation:

Since we’re about to add community moderators on both Stack Overflow and Server Fault, I need to document what it is, exactly, we expect moderators to do.

The short answer is, as little as possible!

Answer 1

It can be difficult to transition into the moderator role after having only been a lowly plebe. If I were moderator, I'd expect to have a transition period where I was accidentally closing questions unilaterally when I only wanted to be 1/5th of the party closing a question.

While moderators should only have to jump in for extraordinary cases, it would be nice if they had the ability to participate as 'normal' users.

Answer 2

New Edit -- Since this issue keeps coming up, I'll make a few points, based on my experience as a moderator.

As a moderator, the actions I take are almost always initiated by a moderator flag. That means that my moderator actions are never unilateral. There is always concurrence from at least one other person in the community when I take a moderator action.

I moderate based on what the FAQ says, on community consensus established here on meta, and on the primary mission of StackOverflow, which is to provide a high-quality resource for programmers. Based on those principles, if I agree with the flag, I take action, using my binding vote. If I have a doubt, I generally don't take action at all, and leave it for the community to decide.

While moderators should be called upon to mediate exceptional situations, many moderator flags and actions are uncontroversial and unexceptional; they have more to do with sweeping the floors than they have to do with weighty issues such as inclusionism and exclusionism. Having binding moderator votes results in a system that is simple, swift and effective. It makes it possible for the moderators to take out the trash, in a way that the ordinary user never even has to see it or be bothered by it.

That's good for everyone.

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Original post follows:

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This is a good idea. If I might put myself in the moderator's shoes for a moment...

As a new moderator, I might not fully understand the impact of my close votes (they close the question immediately). This changes the way that I interact with the community; I can no longer cast close votes in the same manner than I did before, because they carry more weight now. In a way, becoming a moderator has taken away my ability to interact with the community as a normal user.

The purpose of moderation is not to interact with the community as a "super" user. The purpose of moderation is to mitigate extraordinary problems or exceptional disputes, situations that cannot be handled by the system under ordinary circumstances. In my view, that means that the activities of a moderator under normal circumstances must touch the system in the same way as that of other users.

In other words, moderators should be able to take off their moderator hat, if they wish to interact with the community in a non-moderator fashion, without the undue additional influence of moderator powers.

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Original text follows:

I have noticed that, since the moderator elections occurred, some moderators have been making use of their new moderator powers by unilaterally closing questions.

While I certainly assert the right for moderators to do so, I am of the opinion that, unless a question is an especially egregious case of system abuse (i.e. obvious spam), that it should be left to the community to cast its own votes, and decide for itself whether a question gets closed or not.

Answer 3

This can be used in "grey areas" where a moderator can choose to give his or her opinion but not make a decision alone.

I don't see the point. Moderators can already leave comments, thus making their opinions known, just like normal users. Moderators can edit poorly-worded questions, just like normal users.

And moderators can instantly re-open questions that they've closed if it becomes clear that they acted hastily in closing a question... Unlike normal users.

In what way are moderators currently prevented from expressing their opinions?

This also helps in areas not so grey (questions that everyone would agree should be closed) since the OP has the time to see close (1) and possibly edit his or her question.

Again, they can leave a comment... which can be a whole lot more visible to the OP than a tiny (1) next to the close button, not to mention potentially more helpful (especially for new users who won't see close reasons anyway).

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There was a story on the local news here recently... A bit of controversy surrounding the actions of an elected official. Seems a district attorney became uncomfortable when a business which dispensed certain botanical products opened in his neighborhood. While these products and the business of dispensing them for medical purposes are legal in this city and state, the DA was not happy seeing such trade being conducted openly... and so he began making complaints to the shop's landlord and various city officials. While doing so, he insisted that he was acting as a private citizen and not in his official capacity as a district attorney...

Of course, ordinary citizens don't garner the attention of city officials in quite the same way as someone who works closely with them on a regular basis. And complaints from ordinary citizens don't generally carry the same sort of weight with other ordinary citizens as do those coming from a person elected to prosecute criminals.

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Like it or not, when a moderator expresses their opinion on SO, it is going to carry additional weight. Even if that opinion is expressed in a comment, even without an explicit threat attached, there's always an implication of potential consequences. When you or I say we think a post should be closed, or opened, or locked, or deleted... well, that's mostly just talk. We can vote on some of that, but generally speaking we don't have the power to enforce it. A moderator can however, and thus their words, like their actions, carry more weight.

When I cast a vote to open or close a post, I do so because I think it should be opened or closed. Moderators should do the same, but with the understanding that they, unlike the rest of us, can respond quickly to correct improper actions and should respond to public outcry, since it is the public, the ordinary users of Stack Overflow, who have granted them this privilege and responsibility. As much as I disagree with some actions taken by moderators, I would not ask them to relinquish their abilities or shirk their responsibilities; rather, when unsure what actions should be taken, they should take no action at all, preferring to let the community do what it desires.

Answer 4

Arguments that have been stated so far against the request are not dealing with the point that why a mod should ALWAYS use binding mod powers. Being trustable, not fearing to act in necessary cases, carry more wait, usefulness of these powers, how some moderators use these powers, ability to use comments to express opinion, ... don't deal with the main point of the request which is the possibility to act like a normal user without invoking binding awesome moderator powers.

In most cases there is no need to use mod powers. I don't find these arguments very convincing about why a mod should not be able to act as a normal user when using the site. A moderator is in the first place a user of the site.

Maybe there is technical problem about implementing this which I am not familiar with, but the philosophical and policy arguments given so far are not very convincing.

Answer 5

A moderator's job is to intervene under exceptional circumstances, but they are still a member of the community just like the rest of us. We elected them because we trust their judgement. When a post is flagged, we trust them to decide if the flagged post warrants intervention and moderation. If it does, then we trust them to decide how to intervene.

Most circumstances are not exceptional. Most crappy posts are just normal crappy posts that do not require intervention. The vote-to-close system works for the most part. Sometimes it goes haywire, with vote-to-close/vote-to-reopen wars flaming up here and there. Sometimes people go way off the deep end in being offensive. Usually this is not so. Most crappy posts are just crappy posts that the community can cull.

As has been referenced elsewhere, Jeff has said in the past that a moderator should do "as little as possible" and that "Moderators are human exception handlers." He said himself that the conditions under which a moderator must moderate are "rare."

A moderator must have the ability to act as a normal user because they are not just a normal user. They have more power, and their decisions are binding when they act as moderator. This is a good thing, but if they don't have the capacity to act in a non-binding way then they end up applying "exception handling" to non-exceptional circumstances.

This is not fair to the moderators, because it puts an unintended burden upon them to moderate everything. Every single vote they cast is law. They can no longer contribute to the community, they can only govern it.

It is also not fair to the rest of the community. If a moderator closes a standard crappy post in one place but not all of the others, they apply their moderation abilities arbitrarily. Arbitrary governance is unfair and unjust.

This issue should be revisited.

Cross Reference: Moderators should not close crap, flamebait questions, let the community . Please read the comment chains to understand the thinking!

Answer 6

At the risk of reopening an old discussion, this would be very useful over at economics.SE (where I am currently a moderator) and I guess many of the other small sites now coming into the network.

There is often a good degree of subjectivity to the decision of whether a question should be closed or not, which makes me reluctant to act unilaterally. However, I do want to participate in voting because voting is an important way in which the community develops to be self-guiding and I want to lead from the front. This is even more important when I think a question should be re-opened, because being the first to vote would then instantly overturn the votes of several regular users.

My view is that the community at large should be able to do as much of the day-to-day shaping of the direction of their site as possible. The main role of mods should be to intervene in the event of obvious vandalism or policy violations.

Answer 7

I can fully understand that this functionality isn't useful for StackOverflow.

On the other hand I think it's very useful for a smaller website like Skeptics where the community wants to decide democratically whether or not to close a question. Doing it through regular votes seems to be a better way than having to do it on meta.

Answer 8

I still stand by my close-vote. However, I would like to be able to cast a normal vote from time to time. Every now and then I get lucky and come in after four close-votes.

The example question was reopened, and close-voted again by the community this time.

Answer 9

What I'd really like is to be able to sometimes have my vote count like four votes, if and only if it's the first vote passed. Then it still needs confirmation from at least one other user. The same applies to my 20K voting powers.

Answer 10

I would like to add a new answer with perspective from a site that only recently went into Beta. In the early stages there's a relatively small group of users (we have just over 1000 at Matter Modeling, as opposed to 68,000 on Chemistry and 202,000 on Physics). A few dozen of the 1000 users are regularly helping with the queues, but a much smaller subset of those users will have the knowledge to cast a "fair" close vote on a specific topic. Losing 3 voters (i.e. gaining 3 mods) can then make quite a difference, especially since these 3 mods happen to know about a few more sub-topics than the average user, so they would ordinarily be able to close vote more often. The mods (and the community, based on the election questionnaire) are not keen on closing questions uni-laterally rather than waiting for the normal 5 votes, so it would be nice if they could vote just like everyone else.

I admire Shog9 greatly, but here's where I disagree with what he wrote in his answer: Sure mods can write comments, but that's not the same as casting an anonymous vote. In fact a mod's comment has a diamond next to it and people might "vote close" or "leave open" based only on a mod's comment if they want to get on the mod's good side by often sharing close/re-open views with them (knowing that mods, and high-rep users, can see who's voted to close or leave open).

Answer 11

(Adapting my bounty message...) Can we reconsider this please? I have in mind Chinese.SE, which is a fairly small site.

I don't want to override the democratic process: five votes-to-close send a different message to a unilateral closure. It's more like gatekeeping than moderation.

Being closed by a diamond mod has a very different feel to being closed due to 5 normal community members agreeing.
_{nvoigt, RPG.SE Meta}

I simply want users to participate and feel like their voting contributes meaningfully to the site. From a non-diamond user's perspective, if votes-to-close are always overridden, there's not a strong distinction between voting and not voting. (Voting to close is more like flagging for moderator attention.) The proposed feature would facilitate leading the community towards independent self-moderation.

I don't want this feature because I'm "unsure". Indeed, I could literally process all 8286 questions at Chinese.SE, and decide to leave open, close, or reopen every single question. (In fact, I plan to do something similar in stage 5 of the streamlining question closure roadmap.) The problem is not that I would close questions inappropriately, but that nobody else gets a say. Users don't add comments that explaining how they agree with diamond mod closures.

This is not a hypothetical problem; see Chinese.SE's 2019 stats:

                 Action                  Moderators Community¹
---------------------------------------- ---------- ----------
Questions closed                                 80          3
Questions reopened                                3          0  

_{2019: a year in moderation, Chinese.SE (see also On a small site, if almost all closed questions are closed using a diamond hammer, is this good or bad, and should anything be done?)}

I intend to make efforts to help the site grow, but its dependence on diamond-hammer closures is not scalable (helicopter moderation); I need non-diamond moderators to take responsibility here.

Yes, there are workarounds:

• I can create a sockpuppet to achieve this goal, but it's a waste of time, and feels inappropriate.
• I can carefully wait until I'm the 5-th voter, which is also a waste of time.
• I can nag-to-close (via comments, meta, chat).

We have a perfectly good review system: why not use it? (In fact, a previous feature request requested simply bumping to the review queue.)

(PS.: diamond downvotes don't analogously count for 5 downvotes. It's proof-of-concept that not every diamond moderator decision carries extra weight.)

Answer 12

+1 here, I agree. What I would hate to see, though, is a flame war against a mod where someone thinks that they're being singled out when a mod chooses to use their mod-close-vote.

But we all know our mods have tough skin to deal with that :)

Answer 13

There is no way for a moderator to cause a question to go to the close queue. However, a mod can cause a question to go to the reopen queue by editing the post and checking the box that the edit fixes the post. This is because it does not cast a reopen vote — the post will need to get all its reopen votes from the community unless a mod decides to cast their own binding vote.

An example: Oxymoron pronunciation (timeline)

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There isn't a mechanism like this for closing. As a gold tag badge holder and moderator, I typically leave a comment explaining my thoughts on borderline questions that may need to be closed.

Answer 14

This can be used in "grey areas" where a moderator can choose to give his or her opinion

A moderator can simulate having a single vote: i.e. to express an opinion, comment or downvote -- don't vote immediately, instead wait until/unless there are three or four other close vote from users -- and then cast the last (binding) vote.

You can also discuss the post on Meta (or in chat), and hold off on voting until you get some consensus there.

Answer 15

Assuming moderators know how to reach one another through email or whatever:

Would it help if a moderator-vote would count as 3 or 4 normal votes? And hence requiring at least one other person to vote?

(Of course that implies a moderator might need to get in touch with another moderator for urgent things, which, I guess, is not too nice. At all. So I doubt it would help; still maybe moderators feel differently?)

Answer 16

I like the current way it is, as a moderator you should be trusted to make judgement calls, you are where the buck stops.

Making these kind of day-to-day decisions subject to committees is paralyzing.

I would like to close this question but only if others do, sounds extremely wussy to me. Make a decision, and stand behind it.

Answer 17

The purpose of moderators is to moderate.

If they are afraid to do so, they should not be moderators in the first place.

As for educating the community, leaving instructive, explanatory comments is far more useful than casting a weak regular user vote in these circumstances.

So in summary: leave extensive comments, and learn to wield the big vote stick responsibly.