3-vote close - how's it going?

Question

UPDATE: While the testing period has ended, this change has been well-received by the community so we have opted to not reset the votes needed to close/reopen to 5 while we look at data.

Please let me know if you have any concerns about this change in the planned process or if you feel the number of votes should be changed back at least temporarily. I'll be back in a few weeks with the results of the project.

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Part of understanding the impact of three-vote closure is to understand what impact it's having on y'all. I'd like to ask anyone who feels up to it to write an answer to this question and to tell us about your experience over the past few weeks.

The sorts of things I'm interested in knowing (feel free to address all or none or add your own) -

• Did this help?
• Did it hurt?
• Did it make you more interested in close/reopen reviewing? Less?
  • Are there things other than 3-vote close impacting your interest in reviewing?
• If you can't vote but do flag, did this make you more/less likely to flag?
• Would you prefer to go back to 5?
• Should it be permanent?
• What would you like me to look into when it comes to analyzing the data from the test?
• Were there any side-effects (good or bad) that you want me to be aware of?

These are merely prompts, so feel free to add anything I'm missing that you think is worth saying. This is focused on how you're feeling about it and what data you want me to look at, so don't feel like you need to analyze the data over the last 30 days - though you're welcome to if that's how you figure out what you feel.

If you have any outstanding questions, also feel welcome to ask them here.

The test will run until about Monday the 21st of June, at which point we'll be resetting the votes to close up to 5 while I review the responses here and dig into the data that we've been collecting.

Answer 1

Oh, please do not reset it to 5 while reviewing anything. This change has been such a massive improvement that going back to 5 even briefly would just bring back all the old pain.

Questions are actually starting to get closed and reopened again in more reasonable timeframes, though with all the high reputation people who have left that may not be saying a whole lot. Still, it's done enough to arrest the downward spiral that I'm even spending more time here again.

Answer 2

Are there things other than 3-vote close impacting your interest in reviewing?

The UI changes that increase the number of clicks required to do common tasks certainly hasn't increased my motivation levels to wade through the review queues.

Answer 3

It definitely helped, yes!

Items spend less time in the queue and they are processed before they age out... It would be interesting to see the number of items that aged out of the queue before vs now.

Answer 4

From this moderator's point of view the change has been beneficial. Flag-volume is mostly not an answer issues, and is leaving the questions alone for the most part. Once in a while I'll see one requesting a migration to someplace not on our list. The number of low quality on questions has gone down.

Given our volumes the 3 vote limit is much more likely to be reached; however, this can still take a couple of days. That's more of a feature of our site, not the 3 vote limit itself. Seven years ago, we'd get to 3 votes within a few hours of a question hitting the main page.

Answer 5

I Agree to Everyone, 3 is a nice number which does do its job. It's DEFINITELY helping, yes.

• Did this help?
  -YES, Definitely

• Did it Hurt?
  -Only those, that are Spamming this Site with Off topic - So IMHO No ;-)

• Did it make you more interested in close/reopen reviewing? Less?
  -I agree that, it will be more interested than it would be on Five. To be Honestly, I am still yet unable to do it, but it will improve my Acceptance to maintain the Queue

• Are there things other than 3-vote close impacting your interest in reviewing?
  -In case of 5 Votes, this will be a bad Impact, like a dazzle you don't like to want to have.

• If you can't vote but do flag, did this make you more/less likely to flag?
  -No, I would flag the same ways, but it will get me frustrated when an 100% Off topic thread keeps open because only one vote would be missing.

• Would you prefer to go back to 5?
  NEVER Again

hopefully I could translate my bad English skills into Words to be understandable :-)

Answer 6

My impressions as a new user here:

• Many questions are RTFM-questions. People claim to have read the manual, yet the manual clearly answers their questions.
• Lack of research or understanding. People may be good programmers, but that doesn't help them solve networking problems.
• Most questions are by new users with minimal history.

This leads to a few problems: There's large amounts of crud that should be closed - which requires active users with some reputation.

The questions asked seems to get answers, but very few answers seems to be upvoted. This is probably because there's low community feeling; people post a question, and when they have their answer, they ignore this site - or at least until they need another answer.

So my take is: why should I bother to answer here when the people asking the question doesn't bother to do fundamental research, and doesn't care enough about the answer to give any feedback?

Closing (and deleting) the poor questions faster is probably part of the solution. But just as important is building the community; getting people to participate except for asking the one question and then disappearing. And that's the hard part...

More focus should be put into making people interact with the question, accepting answers and providing feedback on answers.

I'm somewhat experienced SE user, with 10k+ on two other SE's.