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It seems that there is a slight problem with having the ability to close questions enabled to everyone starting from reputation 1.

Since this is still a beta, and there are relatively few active members and many "silent" members - some questions are closed without any explanation before answers are ever written to them.

This is annoying. If only closing questions was dependant on slightly higher reputation, say ~200 or so. Then it would be reserved to members who actually participate in the discussion, and not those trying to mainly sabotage it.

There is relatively little benefit from closing questions completely in the beta. And there are enough people with moderate rep to remove the really spammy questions.

Thoughts?

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  • @Pierre.Vriens Downvotes on feature requests on meta usually indicate disagreement. There's no need for everyone who disagrees to comment "I disagree" if they have nothing else to add, and it doesn't necessarily mean anything bad.
    – Aurora0001
    Commented Mar 5, 2017 at 19:40
  • @Pierre.Vriens The discussion about having reasons with downvotes is a very common one, and probably one that is best suited somewhere else than this comment section. You could create a new meta post if you want to encourage people to leave comments, but remember that users are encouraged to vote, and a comment is not required.
    – Aurora0001
    Commented Mar 5, 2017 at 19:57
  • Note that I don't mind downvotes. I mind "votes to close".
    – Evgeny Zislis
    Commented Mar 5, 2017 at 23:56

4 Answers 4

Reset to default
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The reduced reputation requirements are to bootstrap the site during the private beta. They return to normal when the site opens to the public.

problem with [everyone] having the ability to close questions…

That's not true. Closing a question still take a consensus of five people to close a post. And so does re-opening a question if we get it wrong.

Less participation during the private beta?

Your suggestion to slow things down and limit access to the editorial tools used to build this site misses the point of a fast-paced, closed, private beta. Before opening a new restaurant, you typically invite 40 to 80 of your closest colleagues to a closed, invitation-only event to try out the menu, work out the kinks, give the place a bit of a lived-in look, and to give your founding staff bit of experience (reputation) to get them off to a running start in preparation for opening day.

there are relatively few active members and many "silent" members

I'm not ceding that ⤴ point, but if that's true, I would call that a failed private beta — or at least the folks who signed up explicitly for this event are gravely misunderstanding why we are here.

That's how sites get closed.

You are a founding members of a new community. A private beta is (primarily) a site-building exercise to establish what types of questions work (and don't work) here. But that needs more participation — not less — to try new things and fail quickly by closing (and reopening) those experiments that just don't work.

The worst thing to happen to new sites is when initial efforts take off in a bad direction… only to be met with apathy or a diminished ability to oppose or try something better, setting a more sustainable course for the site.

That means a lot of participation — to fail quickly and try again — and that means more participation, not less.

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  • Interesting viewpints / info . I always wonder where in the SE-space I can find some type of help (or whatever) info to better understand those kind of things, like rules, lifecycle, etc. Any links to somewhere in (I assume) area51-land?
    – Pierre.Vriens Mod
    Commented Mar 5, 2017 at 19:43
  • @Pierre.Vriens There's a Help Center linked in topbar of the site, and meta Stack Exchange discusses and debates these points in excruciating detail.
    – Robert Cartaino
    Commented Mar 5, 2017 at 19:47
  • merci + PS: MSE doesn't like me (check my status there to understand), which is also why I try to avoid visiting that site unless I really have to.
    – Pierre.Vriens Mod
    Commented Mar 5, 2017 at 19:53
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I disagree with the rep increase need.

It's necessary in my opinion to have those close happening now so we can raise the concerns and discuss it.

However where I agree it's the lack of comment when closing. While we're still in private beta we should have a comment for the reasoning behind the close vote, specially while using 'off-topic' which doesn't give any help on how to improve the question.

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If we are allowed, I would be really happy with a 200 rep required to close questions. We have 23 users so far with 200 rep. That should be enough.

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Actually I was also surprised about "only 1 rep required" (or close/reopen votes). But I'm assuming that part of the explanation is that this is still a "private" beta at this moment. It'll be interesting to see how the required rep is going to change when "public beta" starts.

What I do know for sure, based on experience, is that when the public beta finishes, and the site officially "gets released" (oeps, DevOps compliant???), then the required reputation for each review queue goes up.

It happened to me on "Software Recommendations": during public beta I had access to some review queues, but when the site launched officially, I lost that access. Guess how frustrating that was ... "Thank you SE friends, is that your way of saying thanks to early beta participants?".

PS: maybe this is something implemented with "Feature Flag Toggles" that are operated by somebody like Robert Cartaino???

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  • For public beta, the reputation for closing/reopening will be 500.
    – THelper
    Commented Mar 6, 2017 at 10:22
  • It's 3000. Just go to a typical non-beta site and type /privileges behind the url, for example: skeptics.stackexchange.com/privileges. Note that for the StackOverflow site some reputation-levels (like propose tags) are different.
    – THelper
    Commented Mar 6, 2017 at 11:01

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