@Jakobian, if up votes don't mean much in terms of usefulness, and the usefullness is now more or less going to be decided by a few users with power, what is a good way to guage community feedback on questions, you know, just to be a tad more democratic, within the limitations of the technology available to us?

Comments, downvotes. The fact that your question is receiving votes for closure in itself is an indication

Those "people in power" are not only equipped with means to vote to close or delete questions, but are also more experienced, generally speaking, than those who don't posses such power

Just to clarify, it's not an "ivory tower" type of thing, but rather "an expert is more equipped to build you a house than a random person from the street"

and you probably wouldn't like for your house to collapse

Things shouldn't be gauged by how useful they are, since usually you either form opinion that something is useful, or you simply stop caring. But for something to be not useful is to cross a certain line of whats allowed, and that line is a red flag. So I think that things should be gauged by how much they are considered to be not useful

Its easy to upvote without reason but hard to downvote without reason.

@Jakobian, you are saying that the power users know it the best, just trust them to make a good quality house (closer actually to the library of curated good questions that many keep talking about). OK. deference to expertise ("doctor knows the best", "mother knows the best" ....) is one way to go about and is fine in general. But be mindful that all these experts (or even groups of experts collectively) have blind spots. Open loop systems are great when they work well.

@XanderHenderson, with the number of questions that this site recieves, mechanisms like votes (even if not perfect) should do most of the work. A few expert users manually making decisions on everything is not sustainable or scalable. It may seem sub-optimal, but is actually needed when dealing with this level of complexity. If you say that votes (by the community) and quality (as acceptable to the power users) have super low correlation, you would have a point. But likely not.

@Srini Votes to close and votes to reopen are votes...?

@Srini that's not what I am saying, but straw manning me is helpful somehow to you...?

of course I am only saying they have experience to make those judgements, which not all users have

I think "power users" is supposed to somehow make it seem like those are those oppressive with power? I don't know what do you intend with arguing to me in this way

Opressive - I didn't say that. That would your strawman of me.

I am speaking about the majority, which is a bit of generalization, but I won't stop and make a call as to where am I generalizing and where I'm not

@Srini when did I say that you said that?

Even if I did say that you said that, it wouldn't be strawman but simply misquoting you

make the difference, straw manning someone is to misrepresent their position

@Jakobian. I intended (to answer your question) to argue here (not specifically you, but the users with some decision powers) to convince them that they are overlookng some community feedback on the question I pointed to and should consider reopening it

I never considered the post in question. My statements are of general nature

@Jakobian. Thanks for your thoughts. I apologize for any misrepresentation of your positions. Not intentional.

@XanderHenderson, votes to close and reopen are votes indeed literally speaking. But not many have those voting rights. I am talking about more easily accessible voting privileges like up/down votes which are avaialble fairly early on to users. Anyway, you feel that they are weak indicators of quality (as accetable to the users with rights to close or reopen). Given that one would have to assume that there are some automatic mechanisms available to deal with scale, that I am unaware of.

Or perhaps resign to the the conclusion it is a manual process at the end of the day and the site and its users are doing the best they can.

k

@XanderHenderson. I guess you are right. It has do with the rate at which one is able to accumulate rep. At my rate, I will probably have this right in the year 2040. Hope to continue this discussion after 16 years, LOL.

@Srini At the end of the day, one needs 300 upvotes in order to cast close / delete votes. This ignores the +2 XP for suggesting an edit, the +15 XP for having an answer accepted, and -1 for downvoting an answer or the -2 for having a post downvoted. If you post 1 good answer every other day, this should be doable in a year (if that is your goal).

(With "good answer" meaning one or two upvotes plus the green check sometimes.)

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