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Part of understanding the impact of single-vote closure for HW Recs is to understand what impact it had on y'all. I'd like to ask anyone who feels up to it to write an answer to this question and to tell us about your experience over the last month.

  • Did this help?
  • Did it hurt?
  • Did it make you more interested in reviewing? Less?
  • If you can't vote but do flag, did this make you more/less likely to flag?
  • Was one the right number?
  • Should it be permanent?

These are merely prompts, so feel free to add anything I'm missing that you think is worth saying.

Get this to me by next Monday (12 August) if you will!

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  • Honestly, I think we have a participation problem. Fix that and we don't need single-vote closure. This meta about single-vote closure smells like an XY problem to me.
    – Mast
    Aug 7, 2019 at 17:26
  • I mean, I'm here just about never and still rank 30th in all-time voting on meta. What does this tell you about the userbase? The site simply isn't doing so well.
    – Mast
    Aug 7, 2019 at 17:29
  • There's only ~24 people who even have the privilege to close vote. 20 haven't used the site in 7 days, 17 haven't been here in a month. Expecting those users to a. come more frequently just to close questions and b. to want to close questions all the time... when we require five votes to close... that's asking a lot. If people feel like they're struggling against impossible requirements, they're going to disengage. My hope would be that making closing easier would make more people feel like it's worth their time to participate.
    – Catija
    Aug 7, 2019 at 17:33
  • I'm going to be frank here, but that is solving the wrong problem. We can't run this site on less users, no matter what tricks we try. Either there's going to be more users, or this site isn't going to make it. Can you tell us a bit about how often people voted during this test vs how often people voted the months before?
    – Mast
    Aug 7, 2019 at 17:51
  • I'll be posting stats in a couple of days.
    – Catija
    Aug 7, 2019 at 21:00

3 Answers 3

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Mast makes a good point in comments:

Honestly, I think we have a participation problem. Fix that and we don't need single-vote closure. This meta about single-vote closure smells like an XY problem to me.

The root of the problem we have on this site is participation. We don't have enough users to cope with the normal moderation load of a site.

That said, Catija also makes a good point:

If people feel like they're struggling against impossible requirements, they're going to disengage. My hope would be that making closing easier would make more people feel like it's worth their time to participate.

Personally, I like having 1-vote closure. From a purely selfish point of view, it reduces the workload for the moderators - we're not having to close 99% of questions that need it any more - it's still a significant proportion, but it's noticeably smaller. We're now mostly dealing with "closed w/o comment" flags instead. From a more community-focused POV, having the lowered closure requirements means we're more likely to get and retain new users, which puts us in a better position towards long-term stability.

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Full Delete is hurting this site. I agree that we have a participation problem, but this is making it worse.

I really enjoy sharing my knowledge and experience on this site. I have no interest in being a search bot. It seems that questions and answers are being deleted based on a skimming glance of whether it fits a format. This is eliminating questions that are looking for hardware, when they dont really know how to navigate the field. If the OP is an enthusiast in the area they are searching and can formulate a perfect question, why would they want our advice?

I agree that questions that are wildly off toppic should be deleted, but closing and not deleting, allows the rest of the community to help the OP correct the question. If it is deleted, they are on their own.

In the last month, so much has been deleted, that most of what is left either doesn't exist, or is asking for someone to go and spend hours searching out a perfect product for them. I am happy to point them in the right direction and offer up hardware that I have experience with, but recent site administration has discouraged me from further participation...

Please note that I love this site and I am not blaming the mods for its lack of participation; its just a small niche on SE. I think we should only delete a question/answer if it has been around for a few weeks and not improved. Closure is sufficient enough to get the point across.

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I know it's late, but this question deserves more answers.

"Did it hurt?"

Yes.

Having a topic deleted always hurts, specially when it's unilateral, and being there other options like "closing" the question for enhancement.

This forum is already dead. Not only because it has a purely arbitrary and small scope of allowed questions, but because of the negative incentive deleting question strikes.

This forum is dead. And the admins digged this grave.

"Did it make you more interested in reviewing? Less?"

Less. Obviously. Explanation above

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