A single "looks good" should not mean the post is "good"

Question

In the Low Quality review queue a single Looks Good click is enough to take the post out of the queue, I believe. I'm basing this on empirical observations but on Stack Overflow at least, this appears to be the case¹.

The system should not be quite so simple as it enables a single mis-click or robo-reviewer to stop spam/non-answers from being deleted and allows a single "looks good" to override multiple people's delete votes. I had envisaged this more as a scoring system; say the post has to reach a score of -X to be deleted or +Y to be saved. A Recommend Deletion click would be a -1 and a Looks Good click would be a +1.

If Y is less than X then a minority of people can still save an answer from deletion by people not paying attention but they cannot overrule the majority easily. If, for instance, Y was 2 and X was 5, once 4 deletion "votes" had been gained it would take 6 looks good "votes" to save the answer. Equally, the one person who clicked Looks Good at the beginning cannot take the post out of the queue on their own and if an additional 6 people think the post should be deleted then it will be. (Obviously, these numbers are not necessarily appropriate for every/any site in the network).

_{1. Evidence - Single "looks good" click, "looks good" after a deletion vote.}

Answer 1

A post enters the Low Quality queue based on either simple heuristics (the system's quality score) or one person's flag.

At this point, there's a reasonable chance that the post should be deleted, but that's hardly a given: the system can't judge the context of the post or even the meaning of the content, and folks have a long history of misusing the VLQ flag.

In some cases, the quality of a post changes between the time it enters the queue and the time it leaves. Remember, reviewers are prompted to leave an explanatory comment when voting or recommending deletion - occasionally, an author will read this and edit his post.

Finally, this emphatically is not a scoring system - we have one of those already. You're not collaborating here to judge the worth of a post, you're helping to answer a question:

• Is this post complete, unsalvageable garbage, an embarrassment to its author, a shame to his ancestors, and a blight upon the site?

This isn't a question to be taken lightly: if the answer is "yes", the post will be removed from the site, an action normally reserved for moderators and trusted users. This isn't a choice between two equally-preferable outcomes: the burden should be on the folks who think a post should be removed, not equally-divided and certainly not the other way around. If the reviewers make a mistake and fail to delete a bad post, there's a fallback that involves the elected moderators; since the post is still visible to everyone, there's a good chance someone else will see it and flag it. This isn't the case for the reverse: if a reasonable post is deleted, only a handful of people can still even find it.

That said, although we don't have the fancy system you propose, it isn't quite as simple as you suppose either:

• If multiple readers flag a post, it'll take multiple reviewers to override them.
• If both the system and a reader flag a post, it'll take two reviewers to override them (does not apply to Stack Overflow, since the system doesn't flag posts there).
• If trusted users vote to delete, those votes persist regardless of how many people respond "Looks Good". Because we trust them.

So far, this seems to be working reasonably well, and has removed a great deal of fairly mindless work from the moderator queue.