Reduce close/reopen vote thresholds to 3?

Question

Shortly after posting Is it possible to reduce the number of close votes needed for certain types of close reasons?, I discovered that Stack Overflow and other SE sites are testing moving to a 3-vote threshold for closing and reopening instead of 5-vote.

Personally, this seems like generally the right thing to do at JLSE too (to reduce noise, improve site quality, and reduce maintenance stress). One of the SE community managers suggested we had a discussion about it, so here's a meta thread! Please leave comments, answers, and votes if you have any opinions whether we should lower our threshold to 3.

Answer 1

A bit over a year since y'all escalated this to the Community Team — apologies for the delay there! But the good news is you now officially only need 3 close votes to close a question on Japanese Language SE!

After looking at the data, I think it's clear that there's no reason for y'all to have this set at 5. Thank you so much for bearing with us while we got to this request.

We'll check back in with you all in a few months to see how things are going — if things are going great, we may not post an update but please feel free to leave a comment if you want us to post something.

Here's some basic stats of how things look:

Over the last two years, you've had decent numbers when looking into what percentage of questions that received at least one flag or vote to close actually ended up getting closed. While there are some dips here and there (the one in early 2022 is particularly noticeable), things have been generally in the 60-90% range and, the numbers of posts this represents are relatively small.

Additionally, the graph below shows that the community is doing the bulk of the closing — which is a good thing!

When working on this project, Catija had found two primary use cases for this change:

1. When too many items are going unhandled (not unclosed, just unhandled)
2. When the moderators are doing the bulk of the closing/reopening.

The second point there is moot, given the fact that the community appears to be doing about twice as much closing as the mods. But the first graph still shows that there's around ~20% of tasks aging out from the review queue on any given month. The hope is that changing this to three votes to close/reopen will make it so that first graph grows closer to 100%!

Answer 2

I think we should do it. Here's my suggestion:

1. Ask SE to turn it on.
2. See how it is.
3. In three months, we should start another meta discussion and decide if it's been a success or a failure. If we don't like it, we can ask SE to change it back at that point.

In chat, Flaw brought up one possible problem:

We want a faster close>edit>reopen cycle and a lower vote threshold seems to help this. But we also want a robust close>stay-closed process and that needs a higher vote threshold.

I'm not convinced this really needs a higher vote threshold, though. I think that most of the time a post reaches three close or reopen votes, it ends up being closed or reopened. It just takes longer in the current system. Changing to three votes would streamline the process and help the site run a bit smoother.

It's possible that under the new system posts will end up getting closed or reopened when they shouldn't really, but we can use the existing tools we have to solve those problems as they come up, if they come up. My feeling is that once we’ve tried it out, though, we’ll likely want to keep it that way. And trying it is the best way to test whether those problems are actual or purely theoretical.

In the worst case, if we feel it's a major problem, we can revisit it before the three months are up. The reasons I want to set a three month schedule are these:

• To give us enough time to see if any problems do come up.
• To make sure we don't forget to talk about it on meta eventually and decide whether it's been successful or not.

I'd really like to hear more feedback from our community before we decide to ask SE to try it out, though. I hope everyone will leave comments, answers, or votes as Darius asked in his post, so we can get more of a community consensus before moving forward.

Answer 3

I'm not opposed to the idea of lowering the vote threshold, but I do want to see what the community thinks of the idea.

I'll play the devil's advocate so we have some other points of view to consider. These are not my personal stances, just issues that I think may arise. So just to throw some thoughts out there:

• I think we have enough active users to complete the 5 vote process. It may take slightly longer than 3 votes but I think this gives us some breadth in what kinds of questions are acceptable. Some questions appear too low quality to some users but may appear perfectly fine and innocent to other users and lowering the vote threshold reduces this breadth that we have.

• I think it reduces the level of detail of the information from close votes. If we get 5/5 votes we know that the question most probably deserved to be closed; and if we get 3/5 votes we know some users think it may have some problems, but not enough users feel the same way. Seeing the question closed at 3/3 removes this sense of information that we may be currently used to.

• A larger threshold represents the opinions of a larger group. Having a smaller threshold concentrates the power of defining what is off topic to a smaller group of users. This could be beneficial or not.

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That being said, I'm not opposed to lowering the vote threshold mainly because all these changes are reversible. Even if the vote threshold was lowered we still can vote to reopen questions so it's not a big problem even if questions get closed slightly over-zealously as long as we have requests to reopen them.