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It's New Year's Day in Stack Exchange land...

A distinguishing characteristic of these sites is how they are moderated:

We designed the Stack Exchange network engine to be mostly self-regulating, in that we amortize the overall moderation cost of the system across thousands of teeny-tiny slices of effort contributed by regular, everyday users.
-- A Theory of Moderation

While there certainly are Moderators here, a significant amount of the moderation is done by ordinary people, using the privileges they've earned by virtue of their contributions to the site. Each of you contributes a little bit of time and effort, and together you accomplish much.

As we enter a new year, let's pause and reflect, taking a moment to appreciate the work that we do here together. And what could be more festive than a big pile of numbers? So here is a breakdown of moderation actions performed on Software Engineering over the past 12 months:

 Action Moderators Community¹ ----------------------------------------- ---------- ---------- Users suspended² 2 33 Users destroyed³ 9 0 Users deleted 4 0 Users contacted 2 1 Tasks reviewed⁴: Suggested Edit queue 69 2,403 Tasks reviewed⁴: Reopen Vote queue 19 769 Tasks reviewed⁴: Low Quality Posts queue 4 434 Tasks reviewed⁴: Late Answer queue 2 443 Tasks reviewed⁴: First Post queue 21 4,052 Tasks reviewed⁴: Close Votes queue 91 3,003 Tags merged 8 0 Tag synonyms proposed 3 1 Tag synonyms created 4 0 Tag highlight language set 1 0 Questions unprotected 1 16 Questions reopened 93 9 Questions protected 5 355 Questions migrated 89 22 Questions merged 1 0 Questions flagged⁵ 10 4,830 Questions closed 2,784 1,698 Question flags handled⁵ 1,554 3,271 Posts unlocked 4 29 Posts undeleted 27 121 Posts locked 18 242 Posts deleted⁶ 2,627 4,148 Posts bumped 0 1,240 Escalations to the Community Manager team 4 0 Comments undeleted 55 1 Comments flagged 0 2,624 Comments deleted⁷ 1,422 3,932 Comment flags handled 469 2,154 Bounties canceled 1 0 Answers flagged 19 612 Answer flags handled 390 240 All comments on a post moved to chat 5 1

Footnotes

¹ "Community" here refers both to the membership of Software Engineering without diamonds next to their names, and to the automated systems otherwise known as user #-1.

² The system will suspend users under three circumstances: when a user is recreated after being previously suspended, when a user is recreated after being destroyed for spam or abuse, and when a network-wide suspension is in effect on an account.

³ A "destroyed" user is deleted along with all that they had posted: questions, answers, comments. Generally used as an expedient way of getting rid of spam.

⁴ This counts every review that was submitted (not skipped) - so the 2 suggested edits reviews needed to approve an edit would count as 2, the goal being to indicate the frequency of moderation actions. This also applies to flags, etc.

⁵ Includes close flags (but not close or reopen votes).

⁶ This ignores numerous deletions that happen automatically in response to some other action.

⁷ This includes comments deleted by their own authors (which also account for some number of handled comment flags).

Further reading:

Wishing you all a happy new year...

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Last year we closed 2728 questions and left 4125 open. 39.8% close rate.

This year we closed 4482 questions and left 3417 open. 56.7% close rate.

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    The question is, what does that mean? Are we getting better at closing Questions? Or more strict? Or are we getting more garbage than before? Commented Jan 3, 2020 at 14:21
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    In my mind, it means a solid majority of people who come to this site to ask questions disagree with the moderation, for one reason or another. That's a serious disconnect with what I thought was the primary audience for the site. Commented Jan 3, 2020 at 15:19
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    Your logic eludes me. Are you saying it was better last year or worse? During my time as a moderator here, I closed about 300 questions per month; that's probably skewing the numbers a bit. They were mostly vague, underspecified questions that were more suitable for Quora. A lot of these questions attract close votes, but not enough to get an actual closure. We once asked for three votes to close, but didn't get it (Stack Overflow now has three votes to close). All in all, I'm not quite sure what you are getting at. Commented Jan 3, 2020 at 18:56

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