Is "recommend deletion" secretly a vote to delete? [duplicate]

Question

There's a rumor (attributed to Shog9 but not verifiable by me) that

If six users without the ability to delete "recommend deletion", the post will also be automatically deleted.

If this is true, I find it worrisome. It creates a parallel vote-to-delete that users between 2000 and 20,000 rep can vote in, even if some of these users are not even trusted to vote to close.

What's more, these users are presented with the choice in a way that stongly encourages them to vote for deletion, in that the only alternatives (apart from "don't know") is "looks good" and "edit it to look good". This suggests to users that if they understand the question and the answer (and so "don't know" is not right), there is no middle ground between answers that "look good" (or can be made to do so) and answers that ought to be deleted. In effect the UI is suggesting that unless the user would upvote the answer, he should vote for deletion -- even though the vote is presented to him as a "recommendation".

It feels very backwards to encourage users to vote to delete by making it free, whereas merely downvoting an answer costs 1 rep.

At least at Math.SE we have a significant population of answers that are not good answers, but nevertheless shouldn't be deleted -- downvotes are the right way to deal with them. These answers are often short enough to trigger the low-quality filter. Their major characteristic is that they often embody the first instinctive reaction of somebody looking at the question, but are actually wrong for subtle reasons explained in comments or other answers. Having them stay visible but downvoted conveys valuable information to the reader, namely that this intuitively "obvious" answer is in fact wrong. Deleting them would entail a loss in usefulness.

If the secret parallel deletion vote is real, I think that

• It should be made much more obvious to the user casting the "recommendation" that such a recommendation is in fact a vote that will cause automatic deletion without being reviewed by a moderator or high-rep user.

• The review interface really should provide a middle way between "looks good, I will upvote" and "burn it with fire!", such as "no action is needed" or "downvoting is good enough for this".

Answer 1

Yes, a sufficient number of delete recommendations (currently 6 on most sites, 4 on Stack Overflow) will cause the post to be deleted immediately, provided it has zero or negative score. (If it has a positive score, it will raise an automatic moderator flag instead.)

Why these numbers? They were chosen based on the data... And on most sites it also matches the number of spam or offensive flags needed to automatically delete a post. Note that unlike spam/"rude or abusive" flags, delete recommendations do not automatically confer a down-vote on the post, or a penalty upon deletion.

Why offer automatic deletion at all? Because requiring a moderator or three 20K users to delete a post that has been reviewed multiple times and universally seen as undesirable is a waste.

Note that in order for this to even be possible, the post has to first end up in the queue - either because the automated quality-check found it lacking, or because it was flagged as "very low quality" or "not an answer". You can't just pick an arbitrary answer - even one that's been down-voted - and "recommend deletion" on it. Also, answers can't go to the queue multiple times, so if a flag is cast after it has already been reviewed, that flag will go to moderators instead.

Answer 2

I don't think anything is wrong with the system insofar as we are discussing here, except for one thing; I do think that it could be useful for the Looks Good button to instead be titled, for example, Don't Delete.

I think Don't Delete gets across the point neatly: You aren't saying the post is "stellar" or even 'good', but you are saying that you don't wish it to be deleted.

Answer 3

I don't think this is a bad thing at all. A huge part of the new review system is to allow more community moderation. If six, count 'em six users happen to agree that a post, already marked as probably low quality should be deleted, I think it should be deleted.

Sure, the "parallel systems" bit makes it a bit complicated, but it's really quite transparent to the user. If you think it should be deleted, you press that button. If a bunch of people agree and no one disagrees, it gets deleted. That seems like exactly how content should be deleted. It's important to keep in mind that these are posts already algorythmically identified as likely crap, and a few Looks Good votes is all it takes to remove an item from the queue (and thus no more Recommend Deletion votes can happen).

Why shouldn't it cost rep? Well, why should it? Why should cleaning up low quality, extremely brief posts hurt me? Downvotes cost rep because it's marking a post as incorrect; downvoting is different from cleaning up garbage. If you penalize users for cleaning up garbage you're going to start finding a lot more garbage than people willing to clean it up.

The review interface really should provide a middle way between "looks good, I will upvote" and "burn it with fire!", such as "no action is needed" or "downvoting is good enough for this".

No. The low quality review system is not about voting; that's why there's no voting buttons. The post is either acceptable as a post on the site (Looks Good or Edit) or it's not (Recommend/vote for deletion). You can vote if you feel strongly afterwards, but voting isn't part of the workflow for a reason.