I recently decided to start chipping in to help with the close review queue. To my unpleasant surprise, I find that instead of making me feel more connected and positive about SO, going through my review quota just makes me angry and less inclined to think happy thoughts about the site.

(Aside: I wonder if this sort of thing is why some police officers get such a jaundiced view of the people they protect, and why some of them eventually turn away from the "good guys" side. They see thugs all the time so they get a distorted view of people.)

Anyway, enough bellyaching, here's a proposal. I know better than to try to tweak the points and thresholds that are in place -- that's a really hard problem. Instead, how about we reward the reviewers in a way that helps offset the negative feelings from the sewer they just swam through?

Specifically, I'd like to see the best new posts of the day as a reward for exhausting my review quota. This makes the most sense if I tend to review within specific tags; I just saw the worst ones of the day, now help me learn something new about my favorite subjects/tags.

Meh, maybe I'm just sensitive. Even the phrase "thanks in advance" chaps my ass when I see it in a question, so who knows what could make me happy...

So...if I'm reading this right, you want to see the good questions as a reward for slogging through a lot of bad questions? How exactly is that as rewarding (or more) than not looking at questions for an hour or two after you've visited the close review queue? –  Makoto Jun 1 at 0:07
Yeah; reviewing questions nominated for closure tends to make me bitter about the state of humanity in general and SO in particular as well. Another good reason to limit the number of reviews you do in one sitting... This is an interesting idea; need to think about it a bit more. –  Shog9 Jun 1 at 0:09
@Makoto it's basic psychology -- removing a punishment is not at all the same thing as providing a reward. See en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinforcement –  David Pope Jun 1 at 0:19
Do you view going through the close vote queue as a punishment then @DavidPope? –  JonK Jun 1 at 1:33
@JonK I was using the term in the formal psychological sense, but basically you can think of it as eating your vegetables so that you can have dessert later. If there's no dessert then it's just an unpleasantly vegetable-heavy diet, no? These are just metaphors, but at the end of the day each of us is either more or less likely to continue doing our chores based on how we feel afterward, even if just a little. –  David Pope Jun 1 at 1:40
I already find all / most of the questions I'm interested in during my daily use of the site, so I don't really see the value in this. –  Dukeling Jun 1 at 2:33
stackoverflow.com/… –  Istvan Chung Jun 1 at 3:14
How about a positive review queue? Where the buttons are "No action needed" and +1? Go thru the high-voted answered questions, especially ones with low popularity. –  bjb568 Jun 1 at 3:18
@bjb568 I like that. a lot. –  Simon Kuang Jun 1 at 4:00
Nice idea. In general, pretty hard to find hot questions at SO unless you have access to the 10K moderator tools. They get far too little bias in the Hot Network Questions list. A site-specific hot questions list ought to be visible in the associated meta site, perhaps. Works now that we have MSO. –  Hans Passant Jun 1 at 14:46

1 Answer 1

I really do understand the desire to try and make SO a better place but sometimes I feel, perhaps controversially, that high rep users are their own worst enemies.

You've been going through the close vote queue (and you're awesome for doing that), so you're basically surrounded by a crapstorm of particularly poor content. The longer you keep going through that queue, the more cynical and irritated you're going to get, and that may have a negative influence on the rest of your interactions on SO.

Perhaps in addition to rewarding trawling through the queue with easy access to high quality questions, we should consider allowing good reviewers to close things more easily?

How about we let people who have reviewed a certain number of posts and who have an audit success rate of at least 95% gain extra weight to their votes? This could serve to let people whittle down the queue faster than is currently happening, and give some additional meaning to the review audits. If we can drastically cut the size of the review queue then people just won't be able to spend so much time in there and sentiments may start to improve as a result.

I admit the audits are not perfect metric, and that anyone who reviews regularly can probably spot them a mile off, but if you're recognising audits straight away you're probably putting real effort into the reviews to begin with. There's also a certain level of implied trustworthiness that comes with being a high rep user.

I am very much in favor of dynamic voting weight. Manual heuristics should be possible. Choosing the weight should also be amenable to machine learning. If P(question will be closed eventually) >= 95%, then just close it immediately at the expense of 5% false positives (which are borderline-closes). –  usr Jun 1 at 14:15
Yes. Yes. Yes. +1000. The main problem I have is that I see so much crap, and them I see 4 more votes needed to close. :( –  hichris123 Jun 2 at 4:17
Going through VLQ is kind of fun (in a masochistic, "people really write this???") sort of way. But yeah, it can be a drag and leave you a bit jaded. –  BradleyDotNET Jun 2 at 4:31

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