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

There have been more closed posts by the non-mod community members, so I've not intervened as much as I used to. When I've come across a post that should be closed, in multiple cases, I restrained myself from doing that in order to understand if it was going to be closed later by our members, and, in most cases, that really happened, which is a good thing in order for the community to be more self-sustainable (and so that I can have more free time).

So, from my point of view, the experiment is going well, and the 3-close vote should be permanent, in particular, because I don't think that our community will grow significantly (in the next months or even years) to the point of having multiple active users involved in this task, if this has not happened so far (and we have been around for 4 years).

I also think that, even though there's a higher chance of false positives (posts that are closed that should not have been closed) with only 3 votes compared to 5, the disadvantage is really minor compared to the false negatives (posts that should have been closed but weren't), because, in my view, they deteriorate the quality of the site (and, from my experience, it's rarely the case that post that was closed should be reopened).