Why was my question removed from HNQ?

Question

Note: This is not a rant. I'm okay with whatever the reason from the removal was. I'm just curious to know the reason behind it.

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I recently ask this question: Am I obligated to work with my sexist coworker?

According to the timeline it hit HNQ before being removed by a mod. I'm curious to know what the reason being this removal was? And if there is a general rule about HNQ removal?

I'm also curious to know if this is linked to the lack of active moderator on The Workplace? (because with less moderator, you might not want "controversial" question on HNQ)

Answer 1

I am going to use an answer that was posted by one of our former moderators which I happen to agree with:

When looking at this, there's a couple of questions that I ask myself as a basic litmus test:

1. Is this a story masquerading as a question?
2. Does this question look as though it's been engineered to hit HNQ?

In cases where the answers to both are 'yes', it's more than likely that the questions are created for entertainment purposes rather than solving an issue that people are actually experiencing. I'm not a great fan of these "entertainment" questions going into HNQ - they tend to attract answers to these contrived questions and entice people to ask the same kinds of questions so that they can also hit HNQ.

Answer source

Full Post

In my mind, having "sexist" in the title along with the content of the question meets the criteria, plus the fact we have multiple related questions that are similar to yours; thus its having limited long term value here.

Answer 2

I'm also curious to know if this is linked to the lack of active moderator on The Workplace? (because with less moderator, you might not want "controversial" question on HNQ)

I'll refer to my colleague for the answer to your main question, but just to address this part: the reduced number of moderators compared to last summer is entirely unrelated. We have removed a lot of questions from the HNQ after this feature was rolled out.

We very often get very hotly discussed questions on here and the attention from HNQ typically does a disservice to the questions as people flock in to comment and provide low quality answers while the first-posted answers rise to the top meaning better answers can no longer effectively overtake them. And that's before we consider that there is indeed a lot of extra noise, and hence extra work for the moderation team. It doesn't really matter how many moderators there are for that: in the end one of us has to put in the work and no one enjoys weeding through a lot of noise while trying to preserve useful comments.