How many "Recommend Close" votes is too many?

Question

Consider this Low Quality review:

https://stackoverflow.com/review/low-quality-posts/3313386

Based on the answer in How does Recommend Close work and why does it instantly complete review?, it appears that:

Since questions with close flags are sent to the Close Queue, "Recommend Close" basically ends up punting the question from one queue to another.

In the time since I voted to close the question with a binding vote, six people voted to "Recommend Close", then there was one more binding close vote, then three more Recommend Close votes, before it was finally closed.

All told, it took 14 people to close one question.

After a certain number of "Recommend Close" votes, shouldn't that have some sort of extra effect? Maybe 3-5 "Recommend Close" counts as one close vote?

Or if "Recommend Close" votes after the first vote aren't going to do anything additional, should people with less than 3000 reputation even see questions with a "Recommend Close" vote in the Low Quality Review Queue?

I guess I'm just confounded by how many people had to review the blasted thing.

Answer 1

The short answer to this is: it rarely matters.

Originally, the goal was to have "recommend close" and "recommend delete" put posts in front of folks who could close or delete them (if they so desired). Turns out, there aren't that many people who can vote to delete reviewing, so we had to do some extra work to keep the queue from getting clogged up with deletion-recommended posts.

Fortunately, there are a lot of close voters reviewing. Occasionally, a post will hang around long enough to collect a bunch of recommendations before being closed, but usually not for very long. Here's the breakdown for the past year's worth of questions closed after being reviewed in the Low Quality queue:

Close votes + flags questions closed 
------------------- ---------------- 
1                   51               
2                   100              
3                   133              
4                   165              
5                   3095             
6                   2701             
7                   1595             
8                   855              
9                   429              
10                  199              
11                  118              
12                  50               
13                  31               
14                  9                
15                  3                
16                  1                

First thing you'll notice is that there aren't a tremendous number of questions (by Stack Overflow standards) in the Low Quality queue. Of those that do pass through, the majority are closed with a single flag (or less). By the time we're up to 3 flags, we're down to about 1700 questions that could've been closed faster; 5 brings it just over 400. That's for a year.

I'm not trying to rule out the idea of giving multiple flags some kind of weight in the future, just explaining why we didn't bother doing that here; I wouldn't mind seeing some sort of weight associated with flags/votes that scales as you gain more experience on the site, to the point where top users' votes carry nearly as much weight as moderators'... But that's a lot of complexity and a major change that would extend far beyond this one queue.

I do think it probably makes sense to just skip over heavily-flagged posts for reviewers unable to actually vote though. And this might even be feasible to implement.