Recent changes of site moderation behavior

Question

I experienced multiple changes on the sites behavior. I am suspecting the changes to the last moderator election, but I don't think there must exist also a causal link.

The changes:

1. There is much more migration. I thank for you all of this, I never understood why is the migration handled as taboo, especially if it could save a question.
2. Moderators (especially @MichaelHampton and our new @Sven) are like to particip in close/open votes directly.
3. Closed questions are often nearly instantly deleted. I think, it is bad.

These changes (especially (1)) diverge heavily from the common SE site behavior, what I experienced.

I heavily favor (1), on my opinion a question migration is per definitionem the best way to save an offtopic question, because it is the only non-destructive solution. I can't enough thankful to see, that the mods of the site somehow start to break this common, irrational SE "taboo".

I think, (2) contradicts the principle of the community decision. The problem is, that mods don't have the possibility to vote without using their super-powers. There is a thread on meta SE about that (if you want I could dig out the link), I think until that a workable solution exist, the best were if the mods (with permission) temporarily could have a secondary account for community votes.

I am strongly against (3). The possibility to advice the OP, or simply to see, what is happened, will be lost. I think, if a question is bad or offtopic, the primary solution should be to advice the opener, migrate a question to a better place, and only the last result should be a close/delete.

So, what is behind these changes?

Answer 1

What changes? We have two more mods that are kind of active (HopelessN00b and me), but that's about all of the changes I see.

To your points:

There is much more migration. I thank for you all of this, I never understood why is the migration handled as taboo, especially if it could save a question.

The best way to deal with a crap question is to get rid of it. Forcing it on another site is unfair to that sites' users and I don't want to migrate crap. Also, I don't have the impression that we migrated more questions than before, but if you like you can dig into the data tools to get some nice statistics.

Moderators (especially @MichaelHampton and our new @Sven) are like to particip in close/open votes directly.

Yes. If I see a question that is clearly off topic, I'll close it. I also close potential topical question that need massive edits and reopen them if I see them in the respective review queue and they are actually improved (which happens far too seldom). I also don't VtC on a large amount of questions because my vote is binding. Your idea of using a second account is completely unrealistic, and there will likely never be a non-binding vote for mods as Atwood decided we don't need this feature, but even if we had it, you would see about the same amount of mod votes from me as now, plus even more non-mod votes.

Also, you have always the option to vote for a reopen. If you do this, the question will be placed in the reopen review queue where enough users will see it to override a mod decision if they deem it necessary.

Closed questions are often nearly instantly deleted. I think, it is bad.

I don't see this. Real bad questions tend to collect three delete votes fast, but we don't want these anyway and this is a small percentage of questions. "Normal" closed questions without answers will be autodeleted by the system after some time, which is also a good thing in my view. Other than that, there is no significant manual deletion going on.

Howerver, I would like to delete much more stuff much earlier to keep our site nice and clean - having a start page with lots of closed and downvoted questions is not very inviting to potential high value users we would like to attract. That wouldn't be an issue if we had filters for what we get to see, but this isn't the case.

Answer 2

I would like to see some supporting evidence for your statements. You are speaking of your impressions, which may or may not conform to the actual data on how questions are treated. It would be better to first determine if there is a change, before trying to figure out the reasons for it.

I also take issue with this sentence:

I think, if a question is bad or offtopic, the primary solution should be to advice the opener, migrate a question to a better place, and only the last result should be a close/delete.

You are of course correct that an off-topic question, which would be on-topic at another site, should be migrated to that site. I have never seen anyone argue against this.

However, this is only applicable if the lack of topicality is the only issue with the question. If the question is a bad one for other reasons, then we'd be passing on something bad to other people to handle. This is not neigbourly; we object when e.g. StackOverflow do it to us, and we should treat other sites the way we want to be treated.

If a question is bad but salvageable, giving advice might be the appropriate thing to do. If it's not salvageable, why should we keep it around? In what way would it increase the value of the site to all its users?

Answer 3

1. There is much more migration. I thank for you all of this, I never understood why is the migration handled as taboo, especially if it could save a question.

Actually, there isn't. Well, maybe there is. We migrate so few questions, it's hard to tell. Our 90-day average for migrations away is at 6.5 questions/day, which is about where it was last time I checked, so I'm not seeing much that would indicate a significant increase in the migration rate.

Either way, I generally don't migrate questions, for the simple reason that Stack Exchange sites only want good, quality questions. If the person asking the question can't even ask it on a site where it's on-topic, chances are, it's not a good question.

Migration also shifts the effort away from the person asking and onto community members with enough rep and moderators. Before being migrated, a question should be verified as good and topical for the destination site, as well as checked that it's not a duplicate of an existing question on the destination site. All those things are something the person asking the question should be doing before asking the question anywhere, and is more effort than I personally care to put into handling someone else's problem or curiosity.

There are exceptions, of course, for exceptional questions, but my threshold for what's exceptional or even worth the effort is much lower than 6.5 a day, so if anything, I think we migrate too many questions.

2. Moderators (especially @MichaelHampton and our new @Sven) are like to particip in close/open votes directly.

Yeah, well, a lot of questions don't require 5 opinions to decide if they're on-topic or not, and the vast majority, if not all, of the mod votes in the close and reopen queues are on questions where it's pretty clear-cut whether we want the question or not.

The reopen queue, in particular, is triggered whenever a closed question is edited, and the vast, vast majority of those edits don't come anywhere near close enough to addressing the underlying issues that got the question closed in the first place. So they don't need three people to decide, they only require one person to say that adding pleas halp!!!!!!!!!!!! to a question doesn't make it on topic.

The close queue, likewise, is filled with crap that's easy to decide on, and lately, we have a person or two chasing flag badges by flagging old product-recommendation threads for closure. When the situation is less clear-cut, we let the community decide. At this very moment, I have 22 skipped review queue items, and all except one or two of those are from the close-vote queue.

3. Closed questions are often nearly instantly deleted. I think, it is bad.

No they're not. I think you're referring to this specific turd, which I deleted for being a turd, when it showed up in the reopen queue because the OP edited what he considered to be a resolution into the question. Even if it had somehow miraculously gotten reopened (which wasn't going to happen), it was horrible, and the OP linked to an essentially identical question he asked less horribly and got answer to, so it would have needed to be deleted for being a turd-y version of an existing, answered question.

There's also a 5 year old community wiki question about funny Easter eggs in tools that I deleted, but other than that, every closed and deleted question so far this week has been a result of the auto-deletion scripts deleting negative scored, closed, unanswered questions after 9 days.

But, even if not, so what? The posters can see their own deleted questions and get feedback that way, and negative scored, closed, unanswered questions get deleted after 9 days anyway, so... well, so what if crappy closed questions get deleted right after they're closed? Wouldn't make a difference to anything even if it was happening, which it isn't.

Answer 4

Honestly, here I share with our community the answer, which I could have consider a fair answer.

1. First, most of the migrations are initiated by the community, and not a moderator. I can't speak in the name of them, but imho the strongest motivation is to preserve the professional system administrator profile of the site, instead of a change to a clone of unix SE or superuser SE.
2. Mods take part in the votes, because they can, and this makes the question closing process much faster. So there is no need to wait the 5 close votes.
3. Closed questions are instantly deleted, because they aren't look really beautiful and we want to attract quality.