Timeline for Allow moderators to view close and delete vote history
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
24 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Aug 31, 2022 at 17:51 | vote | accept | Ryan M | ||
| Aug 31, 2022 at 12:15 | answer | added | marradosStaffMod | timeline score: 37 | |
| Aug 31, 2022 at 12:15 | history | edited | marradosStaffMod | edited tags | |
| Aug 11, 2022 at 10:53 | history | edited | JNatStaffMod | edited tags | |
| Jul 27, 2022 at 18:26 | comment | added | ColleenV | Yeah, I do think SO is too big and should be busted up into smaller communities, so I'm biased. I think that the tooling for mods of all SE sites is woefully inadequate. I also think that SE does not give users enough feedback on how well they are "fitting in" with their community. I don't know how often my votes are out of line with what other people think. I don't know how many times my comments have been flagged as rude, etc. Without that feedback, too much responsibility for keeping the community healthy falls on mods. | |
| Jul 27, 2022 at 18:20 | comment | added | ColleenV | I may have given y'all the impression I'm opposed to this... I'm not. I even upvoted it. I do get a little worried by the idea that mods should be wading through someone's close votes and deciding if they're valid. All I hope to accomplish here is to make y'all articulate the problem you're trying to solve and think about how you intend to use your power. If one person can follow the rules and significantly disrupt SO, that is not a problem with humans having too little information to make a judgement call. That's a problem with the system not scaling properly. | |
| Jul 27, 2022 at 17:07 | comment | added | Ryan M | Even if they're not actually managing to close anything, they're creating a huge mess for others to clean up, requiring disproportionate amounts of effort from volunteers. One close voter can cast 50 close votes per day. That's creating at least 150 review tasks—almost four people doing the maximum number of reviews—in a queue that already allows hundreds of reviews to age out without completion every day. That's a huge waste of everyone's time and is preventing questions that actually need closure from being reviewed. | |
| Jul 27, 2022 at 16:36 | comment | added | Ryan M | @ColleenV "The SE system is robust enough to handle a few outliers." While this is true on smaller sites, it's really not true at Stack Overflow's scale. We have many, many active close voters. The close vote threshold is a tiny fraction of that, and many of them have gold badges. For every question asked per day on your most active site, we have 200. Even large-scale abuse can get lost in the noise, and moderators/curators cannot be everywhere at once like they can on a smaller site. We have 500 custom flags pending reporting all sorts of abuse. We really need more/better tooling here. | |
| Jul 27, 2022 at 16:33 | comment | added | Machavity | @ColleenV What SO moderation changes here are the large number of gold badges. When one person can close a question (especially when another person has answered it), it can sometimes look like a form of targeted action. We have large sub-communities where highly active users are bumping against each other in this way. Validating claims of targeting isn't something we have tooling for. If you want to know what this looks like in practice, here you go | |
| Jul 27, 2022 at 16:28 | comment | added | Henry Ecker | "Pretty much anything a user can do can be undone." I think part of Ryan's point is that, while this is true, mods can't currently see what "was done" to be able to undo it. | |
| Jul 27, 2022 at 15:13 | comment | added | ColleenV | If one person using their privileges according to the rules of the system can completely disrupt a site, then we need to find a fix for the system, not encourage people to force their opinion of reasonableness on others. Pretty much anything a user can do can be undone. If someone is maliciously disrupting the site, that disruption should be obvious enough that being able to see their votes is just confirmation. There shouldn't be a lot of calculating of whether this vote or that vote wasn't reasonable. | |
| Jul 27, 2022 at 15:01 | comment | added | ColleenV | It is fairly common for people to mistakenly think quashing outliers improves consensus. It doesn't. It just gives the illusion of consensus. The SE system is robust enough to handle a few outliers. We don't need volunteer mods punishing volunteer users for not conforming closely enough to the community. What harm are you preventing exactly? I understand the impulse to try to reign in 'malicious' voters, but it's misguided. Your job is not to make people vote the right way. If they are harassing another user then you're obligated to step in. Otherwise, ignore it. | |
| Jul 27, 2022 at 14:41 | comment | added | Ryan M | At the scale of Stack Overflow, a few people using their privileges in a way that wildly diverges from community consensus on how they should be used can cause a real problem. At least if they were casting flags, they'd have some chance of getting flag banned. Users with gold tag badges can simply close questions unilaterally, if they cast duplicate votes (yes, this gets misused). And it only takes three users working together with 3k rep and their own view of how things should work to cause a pretty significant problem. This isn't harassment, it's just misuse of the system. | |
| Jul 27, 2022 at 14:41 | comment | added | Ryan M | @ColleenV Close votes aren't like up/down votes, in that close votes have specific reasons attached. "Good" or "bad" is subjective, and so we don't police up/down voting outside of targeted voting. With close votes, we can assess whether any reasonable person could believe the reasoning applies, or if they're just using it as a "super downvote." Someone can cast 50 complete nonsense close votes a day, clog up the already overflowing close-vote queue, and there is nothing we can currently do to stop that harm, even if every single review is resolved as "Leave Open." | |
| Jul 27, 2022 at 12:28 | comment | added | ColleenV | My point is simply that you don't just need visibility, you need the information presented in a way that is useful for detecting abuse. I don't think mods should be in the business of second guessing people's close votes. You may not like the reason someone chose, or agree that the question should be closed, but it's their vote. I can see a need for better tools to understand the interactions between two users to prevent harassment, and that tool should include close and delete votes. | |
| Jul 27, 2022 at 12:19 | comment | added | Henry Ecker | The close votes tab on the votes page in the user profile just shows recent closure votes. It doesn't indicate which closure reason was cast. It might help if the type of closure vote was included on that page: both for the ability to see patterns of misuse for a particular type of closure vote, but also for normal users to be able to see what close reason they used on a particular post. Occasionally I can't remember what type of closure reason I used on a particular question and if the question was closed (or closed and reopened) there's currently no way to check. | |
| Jul 27, 2022 at 5:20 | comment | added | Ryan M | @ColleenV I added some examples of what I mean. While I could imagine cases where we'd have an issue with someone consistently voting to close a particular person's posts, that would only ever be if the close votes were also unjustified, which we'd need to check manually. The problem is that we have no visibility at all, so we have no idea if people are doing this or not. Having more context on voting patterns is virtually always going to lead to better reasoning about them. | |
| Jul 27, 2022 at 5:17 | history | edited | Ryan M | CC BY-SA 4.0 | Examples of misuse |
| Jul 26, 2022 at 16:57 | answer | added | GlorfindelMod | timeline score: 11 | |
| Jul 26, 2022 at 16:29 | comment | added | ColleenV | What is your definition of a "misused" close vote? The automated system doesn't seem to take into account the behavior of the poster when looking at the behavior of the voter. I had some votes reversed (I think) when someone posted a slew very low quality questions in a short period of time. I read each one and decided to DV them. If someone consistently posts off-topic questions, I'm going to vote to close them and it's going to look like I'm picking on that person when in fact I'm voting based on content. Mods need a better summary than what is on the profile votes tab IMO. | |
| Jul 26, 2022 at 13:12 | comment | added | Machavity | I would note that we might need to go beyond just a mere close/delete history. We've had gold badge holders "war" with one another with close/reopen/delete votes (hence this request about delete limits). At least on SO, we need the ability to search by action taken against a user as well. The only way to get that information at present is to ask a CM. It's not cumbersome... yet. I'd gladly accept this as a first step, though. | |
| Jul 26, 2022 at 8:05 | history | edited | Journeyman GeekMod | edited tags | |
| Jul 26, 2022 at 7:10 | history | edited | user152859 | CC BY-SA 4.0 | That might not be as trivial as one thinks |
| Jul 26, 2022 at 7:03 | history | asked | Ryan M | CC BY-SA 4.0 |