2019: a year in moderation

Question

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 The Workplace over the past 12 months:

                  Action                  Moderators Community¹
----------------------------------------- ---------- ----------
Users suspended²                                  19         29
Users destroyed³                                   9          0
Users deleted                                      5          0
Users contacted                                   52         11
Tasks reviewed⁴: Suggested Edit queue             49      4,051
Tasks reviewed⁴: Reopen Vote queue                 0      2,623
Tasks reviewed⁴: Low Quality Posts queue          14      1,139
Tasks reviewed⁴: Late Answer queue                 0        152
Tasks reviewed⁴: First Post queue                  0      4,364
Tasks reviewed⁴: Close Votes queue                 4     12,029
Tags merged                                       10          0
Tag synonyms proposed                              1          2
Tag synonyms created                               2          3
Revisions redacted                                 2          1
Questions unprotected                              0          2
Questions reopened                                10        162
Questions protected                              109        227
Questions migrated                                 8          2
Questions merged                                   2          0
Questions flagged⁵                                11      3,194
Questions closed                                 189      1,642
Question flags handled⁵                          791      2,410
Posts unlocked                                     2         25
Posts undeleted                                   18         98
Posts locked                                      16        318
Posts deleted⁶                                   237      2,182
Posts bumped                                       0         10
Escalations to the Community Manager team          8          4
Comments undeleted                               142         12
Comments flagged                                  70      9,712
Comments deleted⁷                             12,938     13,821
Comment flags handled                          5,769      4,016
Answers flagged                                   32      2,032
Answer flags handled                             960      1,101
All comments on a post moved to chat             292        115

Footnotes

¹ "Community" here refers both to the membership of The Workplace 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:

• Wanna see how these numbers have changed over time? I posted a similar report here last year: 2018: a year in moderation...

• You can also check out this report on other sites

• Or peruse detailed information on the number of questions closed and reopened across all sites

Wishing you all a happy new year...

Answer 1

I think this summary would be incomplete without mentioning the fact that in 2019 our site lost three out of five elected moderators.

---

Further reading for those interested in more details:

• Update: an agreement with Monica Cellio
• Resigning as moderator
• Resigning as moderator from Workplace.SE
• Firing mods and forced relicensing: is Stack Exchange still interested in cooperating with the community?

Answer 2

I've been spending some time in the Stack Exchange Data Explorer trying to see if there are any ways to get data that may be more meaningful than the above, which doesn't really tell much of a story to me.

Of course, I do think it's up for debate how meaningful any of this is, but there were some specific figures which I found interesting. Lately, I've been spending a lot of time looking at review queues and I've noticed that we often have a lot of questions in the close vote queue. It doesn't seem like this queue gets ignored (there are often a lot of other people looking at it, compared to other queues) so that lead me to wonder if we simply vote to close really often. It seems like we do.

Per the above, we had 1,831 questions closed in 2019. I counted questions based on create date - we only had 4,149 questions asked in 2019. So we closed more than 44% of questions. To me, this means that either we are too aggressive with closing, or we don't go a good enough job of helping users understand what the close criteria are.

Of those 4,149 questions asked in 2019, 3,360 of them had at least one close vote. More than 80% of questions got a close vote.

If you sum the new questions by day and compare it to questions that received a close vote on that day, we frequently have days where the number of questions that received close votes is higher than the number of new questions asked that day. In other words, there are days where we are literally closing questions faster than they are being asked.

All of this lead me to wonder: What does this mean? It seems like we vote to close a lot but it's not immediately clear if that's problem or not. How do we know if it's a problem?

What are our goals as a community? I feel like I've picked up on a few common themes as answers to that questionn.

• If we are here to curate a good body of knowledge (in the sense of maintaining a library of quality questions and answers), it seems like we are shutting people down faster than they can help us generate content. I didn't save the exact number, but something like 2,200 of our questions this year were from people who have only asked one question. We don't seem good at retaining askers.
• If we are here to grow the user count as a way to create new users for SE at large, see above. We seem to be frightening away a majority of new people.
• If we are here to help people who ask questions, closing 44% of their attempts to do so doesn't seem helpful.

Am I missing something? Do we have an opportunity to let this data tell us something about our behaviors, and how they relate to our goals? Do I have our goals wrong? Maybe this should be it's own question, but I posted here because the data posted above are what triggered my exploration.