If you don't vote, the site will die

Question

To the VtC vote: The "original" tries to encourage votes in general, to remove bad questions. This post is about the size of the VtC queue and about the role of the community control in the system. The topics are similar, but far from being identical.

The OPs need to have a quick feedback after their posts, particularly after their first ones.

Ideally, it is particularly useful if you advice them, what to do to get useful answers.

The effectivity of the content filtering is very bad, if the review happens days after the post. It is particularly bad, that typically mods have to intervene, because we simply don't have the required 3/5 votes in the VtC/VtR queue. Single-person decisions can't mirror a clear position of the community, furthermore the mods should invest their efforts into other tasks as these.

So, if you have the required rep, please review. Particularly the VtC queue is extreme. As far I can see, roughly daily 20 questions require a decision, thus we would need 60-100 VtC reviews daily. But we have roughly a third or half of it.

You may also consider to help a related community ads proposal (encouraging reviewers to reactivate).

Answer 1

It's probably a lost cause to try to get people to vote more:

Most mature SE sites suffer from a lack of voting - I've seen comments about it on almost every one I'm somewhat active on. You seem to be talking mostly about voting to close but lack of voting applies across the board: up- and down-voting posts, voting to close, and reviewing close and re-open votes.

The thing is, up- or down-voting good or bad content is easy and is accessible to almost everyone on an SE site, but despite that, hardly anyone does it. Again, this isn't just ServerFault, it's across most SE sites. And if people can't be bothered to vote on posts, it's unlikely that they'll do much reviewing.

Although closing bad questions is a good idea, it's worth keeping in mind that their are clean-up routines that will delete bad questions that aren't closed, e.g. see: How to find and clean up bad questions Even if a question doesn't get closed, it's still worth downvoting it so that the clean-up scripts will get it.

The other reason that "basic" up- and down-voting is important is that it's about the only way to encourage new people to participate more. Many of the "old-timers" have drifted away, so the only way to get more people to vote to close is to let them build up enough rep to do so.