And you have my support, if posted now, or later. I will join in protesting mods acting unilaterally.

At the risk of being accused of "swooping in to claim 'what one mod does, we all support'": the only reason that Asaf removes such a large number of questions from the HNQ is that he is faster than the rest of us.

Also, the underlying assumption of the conversation above seems to be that (1) questions on the HNQ, more often than not, deserve to be there and (2) Asaf is unilaterally removing good questions from the HNQ.

Personally, I think that an alternative explanation is that the HNQ algorithm is bad at picking out good mathematical questions.

@XanderHenderson Does that imply that you have actually reviewed these questions removed by Asaf and you agree with all of them? Here is a quesry. Plently (some would say most) of those questions should not have been removed from HNQ.

@BillDubuque I can't say that I have reviewed all of them, but I look at most of the questions which show up in the HNQ ticker feed.

I almost never find examples where I disagree with Asaf's action.

@XanderHenderson That's concerning that you are making such claims without even reviewing the data. I think you will find the community will not agree with you here.

@BillDubuque Please reread what I wrote, and explain to me what claims I have made "without even reviewing the data".

I haven't argued anywhere, so please correct yourself dear @Xander, that you are characterizing these comments as saying

@XanderHenderson Please review the query and tell me if you still agree with what you wrote above. Please keep in mind that what you write will likely be referenced in a future meta discussion.

@XanderHenderson Some things removed don't need to be removed. (2) Asaf can spend the time hawking over HNQ to better ends than what little he accomplishes in doing so.

@BillDubuque Among the first 20, I don't see any which I would have left on the HNQ had I gotten there first.

@XanderHenderson Ok, then obviously we have very different views of the function of HNQ. I suggest you browse the network HNQ list to get a better feel for its purpose. It is not meant to be only (perfect) "questions from the book".

I find it interesting that, While @Xander mischaracterizes my words, sarcastically, refused to respond to me. Please note this, @Bill. In any case, I've got a screen shot.

@XanderHenderson Please give some examples of questions you think belong on HNQ, and explain why.

I am not saying nothing should be removed. But the existential quantifier I support. And please, for the sake of this site, Asaf was not elected to obsess over the HNQ, hence my point (2). Rarely, he is quick to delete math.se questions from math.meta.se. That's it.

@XanderHenderson And please explain why you think none of the first 20 questions here belong on HNQ. I can't imagine why anyone would make such a claim. I am quite puzzled.

@XanderHenderson There are more important tasks a moderator needs to attend to than frivolous obsessions. Handling flags within one month, let alone 2 weeks, spend less time during the limited time they are on site, not idling away by strutting their stuff, or posting pictures out the window in their home, in a chatroom, and I say this only for users who spend very little time per week being a moderator, when they were elected to moderate. Recreation is great; Just spend sufficient time doing what

...you were elected to do, first and foremost. If you're on site frequently, play is good.

Hi, @user15257449, aka atlas7777!

@XanderHenderson You're not around often enough to see the majority of them, though. So the posts you see are not what researches would consider a representative sample to make such broad claims. It says at most, "when Xander is present, and he's not posting photos in chat rooms, from the little he's seen of HNQ posts, he agrees that the little he sees, were "worth removal", especially since Asaf is a fellow mod. Some non-mod users are not stupid!

A lot of users have a better grasp of what goes on, and have the pulse of the site. Every commenter here, if you total the time we spend reviewing, interacting, searching for dupes, keeping on track of math.meta.se, etc. can't be matched by the majority of mods. At least acknowledge and respect such commitment.

I do realize that some can effectively mod spending less time than we. But not many. Please don't alienate those who keep this site running, and do all the janitorial work. I'm sure mod's don't want to deal with backed up sewers with sewage spilling over everywhere on this site. Nor do any of us want that.

For background, here is a meta thread from Sep 2019 on HNQ censorship by mods (actually by a single mod, except for 3% if same as back then)

@MartinR to contextualise that, what are the volumes of questions being asked on the sites where you've provided percentages? It seems that without that information this could easily be a misleading statistic. (Apologies if it's actually quite easy to get that information, I'm quite unfamiliar with these tools).

@postmortes The "questions per day" statistics can be found at stackexchange.com/sites#questionsperday. But I'm not sure how this information is helpful in contextualizing the percentages of removed questions, since at most 5 questions can be in the HNQ at a time from any given site. Perhaps you could clarify what I'm missing?

I don't think that this username is acceptable.

@JoséCarlosSantos Me neither :p

@TheAmplitwist If I remember right math.stackexchange gets the second highest volume of questions on the network, so the HNQ algorithm has to pick 5 questions from whatever the "typical" daily volume is. If another site sees 10% of the volume then there are fewer questions to choose from. We know that math.stackexchange sees a high number of poor/low quality questions (cf the review queues), especially compared with sites with less volume. So it could be much more likely HNQ picks a poor question..

...from us than from another site. Simply because there are so many more poor questions in the mix.

So comparisons with other sites can't be done without properly controlling the variables, and without being critical, I don't see any sign of that being done.

@postmortes It’s a bit more complicated than that, I think. The algorithm doesn’t just pick questions randomly, it picks those that are getting upvotes, and multiple upvoted answers quickly, IIRC. But it’s true that the algorithm isn’t doing great, but the reason for that is more complicated than just the volume of questions being received. Even then, the percentage of new questions that are closed might be a better parameter to look at than just the total volume.

@postmortes but I agree with your conclusion, loose comparisons with other sites are not helpful. Yet, we can certainly see that we are an exception when it comes to the HNQ, and it might be worth looking carefully at why this is happening.

@TheAmplitwist You are certainly right that it is more complicated: to add to what you've said we should also take into account that some users on math.stackexchange are known to upvote poor quality questions as an EoQS protest. So... I would be in favour of not making these comparisons at all :)

Another thought: Is there a distinction between “This question is off-topic” and “This question is not a good fit for the HNQ”?

Or to put it differently: We all agree that bad question should not be on the HNQ. Can that be solved by closing bad questions instead of removing them manually by a moderator?

I get the distinct feeling that the backlash against moderator unilateral action would be worse if they just straight-up closed the question entirely instead of just solving the issue of it being on HNQ directly

also, not every question that isn't good enough for HNQ actually necessarily is bad enough to be closed

@TheSimpliFire That same user or atleast another user with same username has joined back in the site here

@JitendraSingh It's a shame they're user number 1 million :/

Yea, not a great milestone.

I don't think we are the only site suffering from mediocre questions on HNQ. Believe it or not, my recent plea for help in a simple problem on SuperUser spent some time on the HNQ. Earned me a few badges, too. But I betcha many veterans of SU were not impressed. Ok, SuperUser is behind us in volume, but it is part of the "trilogy"!

My worst SO question got the most attention.

And the most upvotes.

@postmortes Too true. I mean that is very true, and yet .... consequences are naught. So "too true" was my means of lamenting that reality.

While low quality math.se making it to the HNQ, that's just the tip of the ice berg. Time would likely better be spent dealing with internal abuse in revenge upvoting, (in protest to EoQS, which seems to have a great uptick recently. Just my humble thoughts. Not to dismiss the HNQ issue.

question votes actually don't matter as much as it might seem

it's actually heavily dependent on answer count and score

so if EoQS is upheld and low-quality questions don't get answered, that actually will address the issue, because more answers = more hotness and actually if a question has no answers it is literally impossible for it to become hot

@hyper-neutrino True. Case in point:

@hyper-neutrino The key question is when are users going to stop racing to answer poor quality questions. I've done my share of flagging, and the original culprits have been tamed, but we were told not to do anything (don't flag) lower rep users until they have more rep. After the original chronic PSQ answerers were ever so slowly being suspended, a void was left..... for other users, felt shut out by the speed and domination of the original, are now replacing them. Plus, there is in fact backlash

targeting user-janitors, and revolting by casting their allowance of votes to keep the worst of questions alive a bit longer. Users alone can't solve this, if mods undermine their efforts.

I'm sorry. After my public humiliation from two mods, the anti EoQS folks are having a hey day. I will no longer make myself vulnerable to such castigation. I did everything they suggested, by the book... in any case, its time mods step up to the plate, and stop leaving users out to dry when they are attacked by other users.

Sorry, hyper-neutrino, you are absolutely correct. But for the mods who actually supported EoQS, they are undermining it by their actions, or rather, by their inactions. Some are doing their best; the author of the EoQS was sincere, absolutely. But some seem enormously burned out, angry at anyone wondering about that. So, if the supporters of the EoQS, are left out in the cold, nothing is going to change. I'm tired of being the "the messenger" attacked because some feathers are ruffled.

Not if it's only for two to save face.

No doubt, my comments above will soon be gone. So I'm taking a screenshot.