Let's give very-trusted users a Closehammer to go with their Dupehammer

Question

^{I'm calling it a Closehammer rather than an Onholdhammer because... well, just look at how odd Onholdhammer looks.}

I'm proposing that trusted users be given the ability to instantly place a question On Hold unilaterally.

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Now I'd like you to read the following and reconsider undoing your downvote...

A trusted user would be defined strictly, the emphasis of this trust being based not solely on the user's reputation but on their moderation activity. The following attributes could be used in this measure of trustworthiness:

• A good track history of successful close and delete votes
• A good track history of moderator flags
  • The user actively uses flags
  • A high percentage of these flags are marked helpful
• User has a history of being active on the website
• User has a history of being active on the website's meta

In addition, I would suggest that in order to use this power, the trusted user would have to add a comment (wait, let me explain before you go recast that downvote!) to explain why this extraordinary action was taken. This also will allow the user to cast a non-binding close vote--If you don't leave a reason, it is a regular vote. If you do, instaclose.

I can already hear the choruses of "asdfasdfasdfasdfsadfasdf" coming... But understand that these users are the least likely to pull this kind of BS move. And if you do, that's great! Because we can ban you from using the closehammer, as obviously you don't care about what you're doing.

Rationale for this proposal:

Let's not waste lots of time and effort closing stuff that is obviously unsalvageable.

Why this is not a duplicate:

Note the proposed duplicate is already status-completed. This proposal also doesn't consider reputation as an indication of trust, is about instant closure not increased weight... it's not a match at all.

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After some consideration, I think it should be named the Haltenhammer.

Answer 1

Even senior/trusted users can disagree, so this will need some additional safeguards to avoid close/reopen loops.

On the "what privileges should we give to 30k users?" question I proposed expedited closures with the following limitations:

• Instantly put a question on hold for any reason other than duplicate, provided that:

  • The question has not been previously closed and reopened.
  • The question, if in the review queue, does not have pending "leave open" votes.
  • (Maybe - open for discussion): the question is on the front page or, failing the ability to implement that, "new" (definition TBD).

• Instantly reopen a question that was put on hold by a 30k user, provided that:

  • The question has been edited since it was put on hold.

This would exclude duplicates (already covered) and migrations (more disruptive, so should involve a mod or community vote).

That was in the context of high-rep users, but I can see your argument that an actual track record of good moderation is a good basis. We all know high-rep users who rarely vote, flag, or review, and lower-rep users who do a lot here. I think the following (in some combination) would be reasonable factors:

• Enough reputation to cast close votes. (I can see this being a 10k privilege, but even if it's not you still need to be able to cast, and have a record of casting, close votes.)

• Has voted to close some minimum number of questions (100?) and maintains some level of ongoing activity (some number of close reviews in the last month, for example).

• Has raised helpful flags on at least 50 (?) posts (comments excluded) and no more than 10% (?) of resolved flags in the last month were declined. (More than 10% declined in 7 days is where you start to get warnings; I kept the percentage and lengthened the period so privs wouldn't oscillate as much.)

• Convention badge: meta is important.

The specific criteria can and should be tweaked, but something in that general ballpark is a good baseline for "we trust this user to do this".

I didn't include a measure of "successful" close votes because that's hard. That a question got reopened doesn't mean it shouldn't have been closed; maybe it needed and got an edit, or there was a scope discussion on meta resulting in a change. I'd like to capture some measure of "doesn't screw up closures too much", but I don't know what to do there.

Answer 2

I like this idea.

However, there are problems with the suggestion.

Making closing incredibly easy for a sector of users means that they are treated as stewards for closing.

(In case you didn't know, stewards are those with a heavy responsibility to look after someone's property.)

As a result, they tend to close more than to downvote like anyone else could do. Especially in the case of Stack Overflow, each close voter gets 50 close votes a day, but only 40 up/down votes. Try to convince anyone how they will still vote fairly and not overuse their ability where they should be downvoting instead.

Additionally, no arbitrary matrix is capable of measuring effectiveness of their ability to close. Unlike providing the Close Votes Review queue, users don't pass through "are you still sane?" checks in form of audits. It is incredibly difficult to correct mistakes if they don't get noticed soon enough.

As my last point, closing is for questions with serious problems that are not likely to be improved into answerable state whatsoever. Implementing this feature means sites like Stack Overflow will become a battleground where trusted users battle low quality questions. This is not healthy, for all of these parties:

• Audience (guests who look for answers)
• Askers (They might get shot down any moment)
• Answerers (Accused for not helping to shoot down more questions; Have a narrower source of reputation points)
• Moderation parties, caretakers (labelled into "stewards" and "non-stewards", divert in moderation decisions causes hammer misuse and frequent problems)
• The pathetic people shaking their heads (seeing the site officially become battlegrounds isn't fun)

Answer 3

I'm not sure if I like this idea. I may like this idea if a more concrete rationale with evidence is given. However, I dislike the idea of giving more users unilateral powers, as I am personally a big fan of community handling of tasks. I also am not sure if old low-view poor content is necessarily a problem to be urgently solved -- if nobody really views it then it's not really watering down information quality on the site (which is the fundamental problem being identified here).

That said, the dupe-hammer seems to be working well; but that does not cause (or lead to, by opening up the possibility of delete) loss of content.

In any case, presuming that a) the community truly can't handle bad content effectively and b) said bad content is problematic and has a negative impact on the site's quality, I would rather see other ideas for calling attention to such content besides giving more unilateral super powers all around.

The surface problem being identified here is that old content sticks around a long time and not enough people notice it to deal with.

In the current system if somebody does notice the content and CVs it, it will go to the close review queue, with the hopes that ultimately others see it. The OP's proposal does not show that the current close review queue system is inadequate, but let's assume that it is for the sake of discussion.

To that end I think a better solution to the underlying problem would be to prioritize questions with close votes cast by gold badge holders in the close review queue. This is a balance. No new unilateral powers are given, but trusted users essentially gain the ability to call the community to more quickly look at specific questions that they deem are bad. There is no real possibility for abuse here. Does this negatively impact the review queue as far as questions with no gold badge votes on them? I don't know. I don't have the ability to perform that kind of analysis.

Another possible way to address the more fundamental issue of information quality could be to auto flag old low scoring questions that exceed a certain views per time threshold. This draws attention to old, potentially bad questions that may actually be having an impact on the world due to views. What should these thresholds be? I don't know.

But mostly, gold badge close review queue priority is my choice here as a balance. I realize it may not satisfy many people's reasonable desire for more power but I am not necessarily sure that that is a bad thing. Also the success of it could potentially be a foundation for implementing a "close hammer" in the future, or at the very least may provide some interesting data to back up such a proposal.

Answer 4

Instead of giving trusted users nuclear weapons, why not give them bigger guns? Instead of being able to unilaterally close a question, just have their close vote count as 2 or 3 or 4 votes. Then you still get some community oversight.