What kind of questions warrant manual or immediate deletion on Meta?

Question

Unlike main sites, (heavily) downvoted questions on Meta aren't necessarily of low quality, and therefore don't always warrant deletion.

Then, what kind of questions should 20k users and moderators vote to delete, instead of deferring this task over to the Roomba?

I can currently come up with these categories:

• Spam and trolling (shouldn't be deleted, should be nuked instead)
• Blatantly off-topic (we get a lot of them every day on MSE)
• Very low quality duplicates (e.g. someone complaining or protesting their post ban)
• What's more?

Answer 1

My modus operandi is to delete only blatantly off-topic questions; i.e. questions that were posted here by accident. Ignorance of what Meta is counts as an accident; the vast majority of the users don't make that mistake twice. The deletion is an extra indication to those users that those questions don't belong here. A bonus is that they aren't shown, not even when searching, so all content you can browse for is on-topic.

I won't delete low-quality duplicate questions; sometimes, a semi-productive discussion arises in the comments. I trust Roomba to take care of the questions we really don't need in the long run.

One final exception might be rants posted as a question; those often don't warrant a rude flag but it's clear nothing good will come from them. I tend to vote to close those as 'doesn't seek input' and subsequently vote to delete them.

Answer 2

It's about the same as normal sites. Read here:

Questions that are extremely off topic, or of very low quality, may be removed at the discretion of the community and moderators.

In my opinion, questions like this should be manually deleted as quickly as possible. Roomba can take a long time to delete many questions.

Blatantly off-topic questions (which we get a ton of) should be removed, along with duplicates that aren't useful in pointing to the question it's a duplicate of and extremely low quality questions that can't be improved. Your example of someone complaining about a post ban would probably fit into the second category as a duplicate of this question. If that question did not exist, I would consider it low quality enough to be deleted anyway.

The only real difference between meta sites and main sites in this matter is what a low quality question is. As you said, a large number of downvotes on meta does not mean a question is low quality. However, there are still plenty of closed, low quality questions on many different meta sites that should be deleted.

Answer 3

Practically - as little as possible. The general community consensus has been to educate and delete blatantly off topic posts.

Meta also sometimes gets used as a soapbox for ranting about moderation decisions. It's probably better since mod messages were made anonymous - but generally, if a post looks or feels like a direct attack on someone, it probably needs to go quickly. It's sometimes a bit iffy - as a mod I'm happy to explain decisions but sometimes folks need to make the call to whether you're getting through to the poster.

Nuking is deletion. Mechanically a spam deleted question is the same as a regularly deleted question - only you need to click through to see it in some cases.

More or less if you feel having the post visible does harm to the site, vote to delete. Otherwise just let nature take its course.