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Since I have the right to vote to close questions while reviewing I observe that the number of "Close Votes"-questions is raising.

Why not getting reputation for voting to close? For example for 5 votes get 1 rep. Why not activating this temporarily until the counter of "close votes" has gone down?

One problem I see is that this can lead to close-abuses, but not sure if this is really a problem in the well-educated SE-community. (if someone wants to abuse it can already be done though with less motivation)

Maybe I'm exaggerating and the 92K (as of writing this) "Close Votes"-questions is not a problem.

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    I am of the opinion that no matter how helpful it is in clearing the close vote queue, it would be just as destructive with people casting as many votes as possible to get rep. You'll end up with too many questions closed that don't deserve it. I think the review abuse situation is a big sign that it would be a bad idea.
    – psubsee2003
    Nov 12, 2013 at 22:43
  • Ok, thanks for your opinion, please make your comment an answer. Because IMHO, it is one possible answer to my question.
    – Patrick B.
    Nov 12, 2013 at 22:45
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    There are already concerns about robo-reviewers in the suggested-edits queue, why should the close queue different? It just hasn't this impact because you need 5 votes to close, there is a lot of stuff and no-one rechecks the reviews for the CV queue. I agree with psubsee2003, reputation for reviewing doesn't really work out.
    – Johannes Kuhn
    Nov 12, 2013 at 23:26
  • Voting to close for 0.2 rep
    – Richard Tingle
    Nov 12, 2013 at 23:48
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    Incidentally the 92K absolutely is a problem but lets not make the cure worse that the disease
    – Richard Tingle
    Nov 12, 2013 at 23:49
  • I think it could make sense to award reputation for a vote to close IF the vote is ultimately successful, but only if it's balanced against a reputation LOSS if the vote is not successful. Then you both deter close vote abuse and reward legitimate use of it.
    – Peter Moore
    Jan 25 at 13:45

2 Answers 2

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As I've mentioned before, the solution to the close vote problem is simply a matter of encouraging more voter participation. With over 18,000 community members with Vote-to-Close privileges, the queue can be handled very quickly if everyone participates.

This idea would certainly encourage participation. One only needs to look at the Review Queues to see what incentivizing does to participation. Reviewers are very eager to review posts to get a couple of shiny bits of pixels in their profile. Given how nuts people go over reputation, they would be tripping all over themselves to clear out that queue.

But.....

One only needs to look at the Review Queues to see what incentivizing does to participation.

This is just a small sample of the more highly voted complaints, but there is an entire tag dedicated to , so you can imagine the scope of the problem. The review audits have helped curb this abuse, but it still it an issue, and took almost 6-months to really get a handle on it.

And in general bad reviewers, while not helpful, few are as actively harmful to the site as abuse of close votes.

A massive influx of robo-close voters will do nothing but leave us with mess of misclosed questions that could possibly take forever to untangle.

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    +1 nice summary. That, and the fact that un-closed questions in the close queue don't form any sort of problem. Abandoned bad questions that stay open don't have considerable negative effect. Closing them is usually just wasting peoples' time. The only problem is bad open questions with activity and that usually gets dealt with.
    – Benjamin Gruenbaum
    Nov 13, 2013 at 0:02
  • (10 years later...) I actually would like to see it go the other way: cost 1 rep to cast a close vote. As it stands today, with plenty of people having the rep required to cast close votes, "downvotes" have become the dodo bird. Why downvote questions? If you don't like a question, you can VTC it for free. For that matter, you can flag answers to be deleted for free too, if you don't like them. Downvotes have been usurped by more powerful tools.
    – JamieB
    Mar 21 at 20:02
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This would be wildly open for abuse if implemented as stated, 0.2 rep for each close would basically be a licence to print money. You could even not feel bad about it because you could (lie to yourself) and say it didn't matter because the question wouldn't get the other 4 close votes it needs to be closed. All these spurious votes would probably actually increase the queue.

An improvement might be only award rep for successful close votes. However, this would still be open to abuse because you might as well spam your unused close votes at potential close candidates; just on the off chance. Making questionable but legitimate questions closable, even if they are of sufficient quality.

All in all this would take away from the desire for questions to be closed when their quality is insufficient rather than have high rep users hunting for prey

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