Remove Reviewer and Steward badges

Question

Badges should encourage good behaviour. But what when a badge encourages more bad behaviour than good?

We hear it all the time - robo reviewers, badge-hunters. The review system fights with that users that only want badges and not want to help.

There are many suggestions how to find such robo-reviewers or how to make it difficult to robo-review. But why not cut them off at the source? Don't make them want to review for badges at all.

Remove the Reviewer and Steward badges! The Custodian Bronze badge should suffice to bring a user to the review system. And we really only want users doing reviews who want to help and not doing it for the badges.

Answer 1

I agree with Bart's comment here

Maybe passing audits should be part of the higher badges. Fail 2 audits and your progress towards the silver/gold is reset, or something similar. – Bart 1 hour ago

But I would go further and change the Reviewer/Steward Badges to something like:

Completed at least 250/1,000 constructive* review tasks. (*No Action Needed Not Included) This badge is awarded once per review type.

As mentioned in other posts on this problem the robo-reviewers tend to just hit the no action needed button to try and fly through as quickly as possible.

My understanding of badges, is that they are used to encourage behaviors that benefit the community.

When does "No Action Needed" really benefit the community?
_{Note: I'm not counting not creating additional problems as a benefit...}

• If a post is good up-vote it.
• If a post is bad: down-vote, edit, leave a comment, and or flag.
• If you're not sure: click Skip (Not no action needed)

To better illustrate my point a gratuitous freehand circle-

I know there are cases when there doesn't seem to be any problem with a post, but you don't feel it warrants an up-vote, hence the No Action Needed button, but should we be handing out badges to people who just hit the button 250 or 1,000 times?

In response to those who worry about the robo-reviewers changing tactics and up-voting instead, why not set up an automated flag to trip whenever someone uses the same review response X number of times in a row.

As in:

• Up-voted in review X times in a row: Flag
• Down-voted in review X times in a row: Flag
• No Action Needed in review X times in a row: Flag
• And so on...

Of course we wouldn't want to auto-ban people who tripped a flag in this way, there is an outside chance that someone really did run into 5 or 10 posts of the same quality in a row, but as its unlikely, it would be an easy way to spot troublesome review patterns and bring them to a moderator's attention.

If we can catch things like vote fraud with an automated process, why not try something similar with robo-reviewing?

Answer 2

Instead of removing these badges (which I am adamantly opposed to), let's do two things:

• Move the goalposts a bit using the audit system, and
• Actually punish those that do a poor job of reviewing posts.

I too like Bart's suggestion in that failing two reviews per review queue should be grounds for resetting progress, but resetting progress isn't exactly enough in my eyes.

If you really want to curb bad behavior and poor edits, use the number of times your progress has been reset towards badges to restrict or remove the user from the reviewer pool.

There's a catch: This doesn't really cover poorly done revisions to a post. That's difficult to encapsulate, honestly - what I might consider a poor revision another person might not, and that's happened plenty of times in the past.

At this point in time, I don't have a firm answer to that particular problem - ensuring that a post's content has been revised as quality is a tough thing to measure. Perhaps we could use the number of declined/rejected edits as some sort of measure.

(Which, again, does nothing for the 2K+ editors who do poor edits...)

Answer 3

I don't necessarily think this is a bad idea but, speaking particularly to the close vote queue, there's so little incentive to work on it as it is. We shouldn't remove incentive without adding some incentive. You know, besides gamification - the general warm feeling that work got done, the site is now a better place, etc., those things besides fake internet points that motivate people to do stuff.

So, I would not support your proposal without addressing the lack of good incentive to work on these queues.