3-vote close - how's it going?

Question

UPDATE: While the testing period has ended, this change has been well-received by the community so we have opted to not reset the votes needed to close/reopen to 5 while we look at data.

Please let me know if you have any concerns about this change in the planned process or if you feel the number of votes should be changed back at least temporarily. I'll be back in a few weeks with the results of the project.

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Part of understanding the impact of three-vote closure is to understand what impact it's having 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 past few weeks.

The sorts of things I'm interested in knowing (feel free to address all or none or add your own) -

• Did this help?
• Did it hurt?
• Did it make you more interested in close/reopen reviewing? Less?
  • Are there things other than 3-vote close impacting your interest in reviewing?
• If you can't vote but do flag, did this make you more/less likely to flag?
• Would you prefer to go back to 5?
• Should it be permanent?
• What would you like me to look into when it comes to analyzing the data from the test?
• Were there any side-effects (good or bad) that you want me to be aware of?

These are merely prompts, so feel free to add anything I'm missing that you think is worth saying. This is focused on how you're feeling about it and what data you want me to look at, so don't feel like you need to analyze the data over the last 30 days - though you're welcome to if that's how you figure out what you feel.

If you have any outstanding questions, also feel welcome to ask them here.

The test will run until about Monday the 21st of June, at which point we'll be resetting the votes to close up to 5 while I review the responses here and dig into the data that we've been collecting.

Answer 1

I liked the change, would like to see it permanently, and would consider it for the other queues as well. For this community, for now, I think a 3 vote close can keep the review queue low which means less moderator intervention. There were many times the close queue would be over 100 and would need to be trimmed by moderators. Whereas through this period, I don't think I've seen it over 50, so big shoutouts to the community for flagging and closing during this trial period.

I would be interested to see which tags, without a moderator vote, had the most closed questions during this period and compare that data to a similar time period before the change, either last year or the previous X days. I would also be interested to see if participating in the queue increased, decreased, or stayed the same during this period.

Answer 2

I like it. In the 5-vote days, I found a lot of my close votes would end up being closed by a moderator as the 3rd or 4th voter (ie, a lot of them never went the full 5). This feels like it's taking load off the moderators, which I think is a good thing.

Answer 3

I'm liking it too and hope this change would be permanent. It feels like I'm making an impact instead of just throwing the votes into the wind and wasting them, like what it felt like with 5 close votes when most of the time it seemed like the votes just ended up aging away doing nothing.

It could be interesting to know, if any of the closed questions ever got edited and reopened - excluding the plain support or recommendation questions. I mean do people fix the issues in their questions, which got them closed, and ask for a reopen or do they just walk away form the site and find the help they were looking for from somewhere else.