Reset the close vote queue [closed]

Question

This idea has already been proposed in response to one of many questions about the size of the close vote queue on Stack Overflow. So here it is again, as a separate feature request:

Reset the close vote queue.

Pick a date, and mark all the close-votes that are earlier than that date as "hidden", and only show the newest close votes. At the point of enacting this, and picking the date to be "now", the queue size should go down to almost zero.

Watch the size of the queue for a week or two. If it has grown far beyond zero, then this experiment didn't work, and you can unhide the old questions and return to the status ante bellum.

But if the queue size does remain near zero, then it means that people are more motivated to contribute where they feel they can make a large relative impact. Achieving "zero" is a feel-good goal, while achieving "91225 (down from 91240)" doesn't feel that big of a deal. And if the experiment does work and we manage to keep up with a fresh queue, then we can slowly layer old questions into the mix, money-laundering style. Nobody will ever notice :-)

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Let me offer another angle on this suggestion.

I want to analyse the claim that there is a motivational difference between a full and an empty queue. Specifically, the claim is that people are more motivated to work on a small queue, for psychological reasons. It feels like you're making a greater impact in making a small problem resolved than in making a large problem a tiny bit less large.

I have no proof that this effect exists on Stack Overflow, only circumstantial evidence coming from the observation that all the other queues consistently go back to zero regularly.

We could obtain further support for or against this claim by looking at historic numbers of queue throughput (which I'd like to see, if anyone can pull this data out); and/or we can run an experiment. Either way, I believe it would be valuable to find out for sure if there are psychological measures that would improve user engagement that we're currently leaving on the table. I'd be perfectly happy to find out that nothing of this sort is the case, but I'd like to know what we know.

Answer 1

Once upon a time, three people were living in a flat. All of them were pretty busy, and quite fond of pizza, to the point it made most of their meals.

At first, everything was under control, but after a while laziness, procrastination and consumption of strong beverages took their toll, and empty pizza boxes started to pile up in the living room. It went to such a level that nobody could find enough motivation to tackle the seemingly insurmountable task of putting all that to the trash downstairs, and things only went worse from there.

When the critical point was reached, one of our protagonists had an idea: resetting the pile. By quickly stuffing all those boxes in an unused room, they could restart from scratch. Naturally, from now on, they would reliably put the new boxes into the trash, so they could take some of the boxes out of that room from time to time and also dispose of them. Problem solved.

Alas, a few months later they realized the situation had not improved at all, mainly because they still felt inclined to leave empty boxes around in the living room, and they now had quite a few others locked up in another room developing their own fauna. From there on, the situation degraded very quickly, and the eventually necessary cleaning ended up involving sweat, tears, breathing rags, angry neighbors and a very messed up flat.

(Apologies for not coming up with a better analogy.)

Close vote reviews were introduced to put our empty pizza boxes (questions with pending close votes) in our living room instead of another room somewhere. Thanks to them (the reviews, not the pizza boxes), the problem is in our face all the time (the increasing number of related questions on Meta demonstrates this), and we're arguably able to measure it better.

Your suggestion amounts to putting all the boxes back into the other room, negating the purpose of close vote reviews, and assumes less boxes in the living room means a better incentive to dispose of them. I'm afraid that incentive, if it does exist, will not be enough, mainly because we have a lot of boxes, and most of the time it takes five of us to take a single one to the trash. We will be back to square one eventually.

Instead of trying to hide at least part of the problem, we can start getting more involved and get organized on our own if we want to.