Policy and rationale for making close votes invisible to most users

Question

Is the policy concerning visibility of close vote count documented somewhere? I gather that the count is visible to the submitter and the >3k crowd, but not to others. If so, is the rationale documented anywhere?

Related question: Display close votes for all users

Update: Appreciate the opinions and dialog about the rationale around the policy, but still interested in clarification about the policy itself and whether's there's any "official" documentation on it. In particular, I'm looking for pointers to documentation on what the >3k folks can see relative to the close votes. Can they see who voted to close? Can they see the reasons for closing?

Answer 1

Here is the rationale:

• most people are irritated by seeing something going on they cannot be part of. Since <3K can't cast close votes or "leave open" votes, showing them the progress could be either confusing or frustrating
• one close vote doesn't mean a question is going to be closed. Some people are wrong and vtc in error. Showing that, especially to people not super familiar with the close process, could scare you off from answering a good question
• sometimes a bad question hasn't yet attracted any close votes - but it will! An absence of close votes will never mean "go ahead and answer this"
• sometimes a bad question gets a close vote and is then edited to be a good question again. It might even get 4 close votes and then be edited. Should it be closed by getting a 5th vote, it can be reopened (because it has been edited into a good question.) But since close votes tend to hang around even though they technically can be retracted, it may sit with 1 (or 4) close votes for days until they expire, even though it is now a good question. Showing inexperienced users the close votes on this question might really confuse them.

Your criteria for answering is simple: is it a good and answerable question? And, I suppose, do you know the answer? If the question is off topic for the site, too broad, missing information that you need to answer, and so on - don't answer it!

When you are new to the site, you probably aren't sure how to tell if something is a good question or not. That's why you don't have close vote privileges. So you might answer a question that gets closed, or hold back from answering and later revisit the question and discover it was not closed and other people have written answers similar to those you might have written. You might take a wild guess at "psychic debugging" and answer a question that was missing details, then after the question was put on hold and later edited, people might downvote your answer or leave you comments saying you're totally wrong. These things sting a little, but in this way, you will get better at spotting "good" and "bad" questions for yourself. If you could see that one unknown person thinks it should be closed, or 4 do, you could just blindly rely on their judgement instead of developing your own. While I have not seen this reasoning written down anywhere, I believe it applies.

Your question, as originally written, implied you'd be perfectly happy to answer very poor questions if they were to happen to escape attention and not get closed. I don't think that's a good strategy. If you're just about rep, know you can get upvotes for answers to a closed question, so go on ahead and answer everything, good or bad, likely to be closed or not, etc. But if you're about helping people and making the internet better, don't answer bad questions. If you can see that it's bad, that's all you need to know. Whether other people have already drawn that conclusion or not is irrelevant.

Answer 2

I actually agree here, in part.

I only see the following (unconvincing) reasons to not make the current close vote count public:

• To avoid excessive whining
• To possibly avoid flag-farming from visiting users. Users with <3k rep can flag to close, if the close votes were displayed some may use it to quickly determine if a question needs closing and artificially inflate flag weight
• It's useless, why is it necessary? It clogs up the view.

Note that the contents of the close dialog (along with the break up of close votes) is available via AJAX (I have a bookmarklet somewhere that can tally close votes on a site which I don't have enough reputation on).

The first two reasons seem pretty hollow to me.

Of course, there still is the following question:

Why should we show it? What's the need?

I do see a need here. A major one. Maybe not for the exact feature you propose, but for something that accomplishes the task better.

"What is acceptable for this site" is not a very clear concept, especially to newbies. I've seen people answer closed questions all the time. And then they end up disappointed that the question is closed. This is a rather bad experience, IMO. Even worse is when a question gets closed as you are halfway through writing an answer for it.

What if we showed a "Be warned, this question may get closed" dialog (using the blue callout, maybe) for questions with 2+ recent close votes. Something like:

There is a chance that this question does not follow the rules, and may get put on hold. You may want to consider waiting a while or checking if it indeed doesn't fit the rules before posting.

It may be a good idea to pepper it with links on what makes a good question/what these mystical "rules" are. Alternatively, add a link that opens a dialog which lists the currently selected close reasons (which clearly describe the post issues).