Allow high-rep community members to help review No Longer Needed comment flags

Question

TL;DR Please, allow very-high rep users (50,000 rep on "full" rep levels, 10,000 rep on "beta" rep levels, and 5,000 rep on "private beta" rep levels) to help review No Longer Needed comment flags.

I'd imagine this could work by adding it as another review queue, where the comments are sent to after they are flagged. It would require 2 net votes to delete from high-rep users in order to actually be deleted (and leaving the queue at -2 net votes to delete). In order to prevent problems, users could not review comments if they flagged the comment, commented on the post, or made the post. Perhaps, in order to help get rid of other useless comments, it could show all the comments under that post.

No Longer Needed comment flags are used to flag comments that are, as the name would suggest, not useful. These types of comments flags tend to be pretty easy and obvious (not just my opinion here, this seems to also be the general moderator consensus), and yet only moderators can deal with them (unless it happens to be nuked by enough regular flags, which only happens 0.1% of the time). On Stack Overflow alone, in 2022, 243,198 comment flags were handled by moderators. That's nearly as much as how many flags on actual posts were handled my moderators in the same time. In 2021, that number was 403,458, significantly more than post flags. Based on this data, about 71% of those were No Longer Needed (NLN) flags. So, the Stack Overflow mods alone handled an estimated 172,671 NLN flags in 2022 and 286,455 in 2021, which could have easily been handled by the community, comments which I would imagine very rarely require anything other than a quick deletion.

As of right now, I'm not suggesting the handling of Unfriendly/Unkind, Harassment, Bigotry, or Abuse, or Something Else comment flags as those are much more likely to more difficult to handle and/or require moderator intervention. The numbers 50k/10k/5k and the 2/-2 are just ideas of number that seem roughly correct, I'm not particularly attached to the numbers here. The 2 votes to delete comes from the fact that it currently take 3 flags to nuke comments, and 2 more user (plus the original flagger) reaches that 3.

Yes, on certain sites, this review queue might get backlogged. But let's say that only 10% of NLN flags are handled by high-rep users because there are very few queue reviewers, and most still have to be handled by mods. That's still tens of thousands of flags on SO alone per year that mods now didn't have to handle. That's still a major improvement.

Yes, I'm aware of these other proposals for comment moderation, but I think that mine is significantly different and address some of the concerns brought up there. Yes, I'm aware that some of the smaller sites will not have 2 eligible non-mod users to do this (however those also tend to be sites with much less comments to moderate). I think that the queue should probably be turned of though for sites only 1 eligible non-mod user, as they would just be wasting their time. I think that we should probably make this an opt-in feature to also avoid the sites where there isn't really an existing comment moderation problem and/or there are very few users who could even review in it. I also think this should not be add on MSE and per-site metas, per the answer below. Yes, I'm aware that sometimes high-rep users make mistakes. However, we let users with much lower rep than this delete with only 3 votes actual posts, which are much more important than comments, and that mostly works out well. The chances of the original flagger, and 2 very high-rep users all wrongly thinking a comment should be deleted are rather low. Something similar to this already exists for chat moderation, and that also generally works out fine.

Sorry this question is so long, but there's a lot to say.

So, please, let the community handle these, and take a burden off of our moderators, and let them focus their time on the things that truly require a moderator.

Answer 1

If this happens, Meta (MSE, MSO, maybe all per-site Metas) should be excluded

Especially on controversial and/or poorly-received posts, even high rep users can and do leave unnecessary comments. These can be negative comments, directed toward SE, Inc. about <insert a change here>. Considering the sentiment can be popular, regardless of the value of the comment, I think comments on Meta (particularly MSO/MSE) should be handled by diamond users (mods, some SE, Inc. staff).

Answer 2

When handling comment flags, it’s often useful to see the full context. This usually requires looking at all the comments on a post — including deleted comments.

If non-moderator reviewers are trying to review NLN comments flags without the full context, this could be problematic.

And I really don’t think non-moderators should be given the ability to see comments that have been deleted.

Answer 3

I am in favour of better systems to remove comments, once they have served their purpose. Comments are second-class citizens here, especially comments that can be flagged as No Longer Needed.

However the only real benefit, imho, of implementing a system of allowing high rep (or very high rep) users to handle No Longer Needed comments, as far as I can see from your question, is to reduce the workload of moderators.

From the point of view of a flagger, there will be no real benefit. It is not a benefit for a flagger for their NLN comment flags to be handled more quickly. There is no limit on the number of flags sitting in the mod flag queue (correct me if I am wrong) so a patient flagger will eventually have all their flags handled. I see no problem in waiting two or even three weeks for a flag to be handled. If anything, the extra time gives me a chance to retract the flag if I review the flag myself and change my mind (it's happened).

It is a bigger risk for a flagger for their flags to be regularly declined. Your proposal will expose me (as say, a relatively experienced NLN comment flagger) to having my flags decided upon by several very high rep users who may have very little idea or experience of how to handle NLN comment flags. In addition, very high rep users may not have access to all the tools that mods have to review the comment history that might be needed, and they probably don't have access to chat with the other mods in a secure mod-only chat room.

• I can only imagine that the decline rate will increase if very high rep users are able to decline flags as well as mark them as helpful.

At the moment, I have a very high level of confidence that the mods handling my flags know what they are doing. This is very important from the point of view of a NLN comment flagger. Why? Because if more than two comments in a thread are flagged, then we must have confidence that the mod handling the flags will quickly see what we saw and then agree with us. With a NLN comment flag, there is no opportunity to explain what we saw.

_{(As an aside, I once used to add a comment under posts explaining what I was flagging as NLN and why and then after the flag was handled I would delete my own comment. However, a mod asked me to stop that habit explaining that it was neither needed nor really useful)}

So, if I am not confident that the very high rep users handling my NLN comment flags will see what I saw, then I will have to start raising custom moderator flags or raising a flag on the post itself so that I can add an explanation. Or stop flagging.

If I suspected that robo-reviewers were handling my NLN comment flags, then I would definitely stop flagging. Even the thought that a robo-reviewer could be handling my flags is disconcerting.

If, as I suspect, the decline rate increases for NLN comment flags then I can imagine that the mods themselves may have more work (rather than less) because:

• some flags that used to be NLN would be raised as custom flags in the future
• some flaggers will ask why their flags were declined

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As an aside, you mentioned that only 0.1% of comments are nuked by regular flags. it would be nice to know which comments have been flagged by other users as NLN, for example the outline flag in the image below:

This would be similar to the information available to us about Close flags for posts.

Answer 4

I have some doubts

I'm not sure users at these rep levels, at least on Stack Overflow where it's certainly the biggest issue by orders of magnitude, are all that interested in curation/moderation. I don't have hard numbers, obviously, but I think the majority of users over 50,000 reputation are mostly interested in answering questions (because it takes a lot of time and effort to get to that amount of reputation and if you spend that time doing curation tasks, you aren't earning that kind of reputation). We already have an issue with high reputation users not voting to close questions that ought to be closed... I don't see them reviewing comments when they already won't close a duplicate question they've answered a dozen times before.

Also, all users can already sort of participate in this--comments flagged NLN auto-delete if they receive 3 such flags from users. I think it would be better if such a review queue just placed comments with NLN flags on them in a pile and let reviewers cast their own NLN flags on comments if they think the comment is truly not needed, rather than introduce some new "comment delete vote" that doesn't yet exist in the system software.

I think there's a better way

Finally, and more importantly, I think there's a better way to improve this without introducing yet another reputation-gated privilege. Catija, before her exit, was trying to spearhead an initiative to rework privileges to be less tied to reputation levels, and this would be a step in the opposite (read: wrong) direction, I think. Users with such high amounts of reputation are not necessarily experts at curation, just experts at whatever subjects they are writing answers for.

Instead, I think a system that augments the existing auto-deletion process would be better, where users with certain numbers of helpful flags have their NLN flag weight raised to count as additional flags (on comments where you don't have any comments of your own). Something like:

Helpful flag count	NLN flag weight
0 to 499	1 flag
500 to 999	2 flags
1000+	3 flags (equivalent to auto-delete)

Furthermore, any declined flags could temporarily reduce the flag weight back down to 1 even if you have 10k+ helpful flags. For example, if your flag history is such that you would see a "some of your flags were recently declined" notice, your NLN flags would only count as one.

This augmentation could exist as a standalone change, or as both a change to the system and in the form of a review queue for users with access to it (based on helpful flag count).

_{N.B. numbers give above are based on my recollection of auto-deletion for NLN being 3 NLN flags... if it is 4, I would obviously adjust those example numbers to match. Also, the helpful flag thresholds for increased flag weights would need to change for beta sites, of course.}

_{Also, I think the thresholds for increased flag weight that I suggested are a bit low, but I was worried about personal bias skewing what I thought was reasonable (I have nearly 30,000 helpful flags on SO alone, and >20k of them are comment flags)}

Answer 5

I'd rather there be a queue per comment flag type for people who have raised a certain number (based on how frequently that type of flag is raised) of that comment flag type and maintain a certain helpful-flag-percentage of the last N of those flags which were handled by mods. Just because you know how to raise/handle a certain type of comment flag doesn't mean you know how to do the others. I am and was a pretty heavy flagger of NLN comments way before I reached my current rep level on SO. Having rep has little to no correlation with ability to properly moderate comments.

That, and/or the deputy/comment-mods idea.