Are we possibly a bit too trigger happy in our moderation?

Question

I find it a bit worrisome seeing how much moderation takes over on IPS.

My impression is that we are at a point where the close reasons are too far narrowed down. I understand that questions which are too broad or tempt to generate opinion based answers should be closed in general. But we should keep in mind, this concept, comes originally from SE-Sites having a technical background, where there in fact is usually one correct/best practice answer.

This isn't working the same way for IPS. There are a lot of factors influencing, what the best practice would be, what an efficient way would be, and almost never there is just that single correct way. And if there is, it depends on someones personality if it is even applicable or if there might not even another answer that looks first bad, but still has value for someone who might have a different background than OP.

Also I start getting the impression that the core community recently started closing questions, that exceeded our scope from a European culture point of view. Discouraging anyone posting questions, not of use for that "core community".

As said, I understand, why bad questions are important to get closed. But I feel like seeing a pattern that we are getting into a habit of considering everything close worthy, the moment an OP just makes us raise a little "?" in our mind. And I don't agree that every post not being 100% clear (for us) is something that should get closed.

We shouldn't forget that the whole IPS topic is about opinions. There is rarely ever a right or wrong not to mention having hard data on it, and even if, its still very cultural depending.

So speaking of Questions, here are a few examples of questions, I agree they are to some degree unclear/problematic. But I am not sure if they really should have been closed.

• Is it rude to ask someone where they are from originally?

  I know that questions asking for something being rude are generally(!!!) opinion based. But in my opinion we shouldn't see the "rude" keyword just as a insta closing reason. In this case there is a context that makes the question much less opinion based than the title makes it look like. Also in the end there is the question added

  s there maybe a better way to phrase the question?

  What makes it even less opinion based. Still it is opinion based, but again, to some degree the whole IPS topic is opinion based.

• How to avoid embarrassment if I forget to bring my wallet on a date?

  For this one the close reason is OT, cause asking for "What should I do?". I know, before editing, the phrasing was "What can someone do in such a situation to avoid embarrassment?" What I understand by our current policys is a reason to close it. OP got aware of it, and even edited his post asking now "What is the best possible way of handling this situation to avoid embarrassment?" I don't see this as any kind of "What should I do?" question. And to be honest, I also think even before he edited it, it was quite clear, that this wasn't what he was asking for. The only indicator had been the keywords in his question, which considered in their context FMPOV made it obvious that even then it wasn't a "What should I do?" kind of question.

• Is it OK to stop saying hi to people that you have no interest in?

  For this one I have to say first, I see that this one might have legitimate reasons to be closed even beyond our current scope. But still I would have left it open. If we had some more insight about i.e. culture. So I disagree it being opinion based (at least to a degree that would make answering it problematic). As mentioned before, asking if something is rude or not is often resulting in a opinion based view point. BUT considering the context I think this is still answerable with not more influence of a opinion than most other answers on IPS would take into account.

• How to tell my violin teacher who's interested in me that I'm actually married after I sent positive signals back for months?

  For this one, yeah I was VTCing it too, by my understanding of our current policys, as the OP has quite a few aspects to consider. BUT they are countable. And I am not sure if we should consider something as "too broad" just because there is a lot to consider, as long the list of aspects to consider is not leading to a long list which would allow an almost infinite set of possible answers to arise. What here clearly wouldn't be the case.

I think I would find way more examples but I think this should be enough to give examples for my point. So this brings me to the aspect of how we are currently moderating answers, what I find even more worrisome.

Let me first summarize how our current moderation in that regards looks conceptional in my mind for me.

• We don't want answers to challange the frame of OP
• We want an answer to fully consider every aspect of OP
• We don't want answers in comments
• We want answers to have backup preferably based on hard data rather than on experiences one had

The problem with this is, it is hard to find any hard data on this topic if you aren't a specialist. And even the input I get from my therapist in my counseling sessions I wouldn't consider hard data, as he tailors his knowledge together with his experiences into aspects that might be useful for me. So why are we here expecting a higher standard, then I can actually expect in counseling appointments with my therapist? I mean if we get that, that's good and we should be happy. but we shouldn't set this as our measure of standards, as I feel like this scares of our community.

Also, challenging the frame of an OP, that's not generally a bad thing, especially if given good reasons. I agree that most frame challenges give very bad answers as they omit some important points making out the problem of an OP. But that's what downvotes are for, I don't see why there should be taken any additional moderation actions for this kind of answers.

Fully considering the aspects of OP's problem is something that should be appreciated an answer not doing it again is something that might be downvote worthy. But definitely nothing that should be deleted at all!!!! Keep in mind, the whole SE platform is meant for not just helping the person asking a specific question, but it is build with the idea of helping others facing similar problems and googling it, having a compact model to find answers to their solutions, rather than having to crawl through endless pages of forums. So even if an answer isn't helpful for OP as it just takes a part of the full aspect into account, it still might be an helpful answer for someone having a similar (not the same!) problem, finding that post by googling the title of it, as the title is breaking down to the same question a random internet person might have.

Especially since answers in comments are verboten, how someone can give useful input to OP? If your answer runs risk to be deleted to not fully address all aspects of OP ore somewhat being a frame challenge, but also totally not appreciating that input in comments. Does this mean, we don't want useful considerations being added at all, if they don't relate to the exact situation and full frame stated by OP?

If that is indeed the case, keep in mind how horribly discouraging this current state might become for the general community of our site.

I would like to give a few examples of answers here aswell, I read over the past days and would point out why I didn't find them as problematic as they had been handled. But since I can't access deleted answers, I can't find most of it anymore and can just give 2 examples here for those who can read deleted answers.

• How to tell my violin teacher who's interested in me that I'm actually married after I sent positive signals back for months?

  On this one there was yesterday an answer posted, it gave a few loose hints on how to act, which softly challenged the frame of the OP, tho nothing I would even have downvoted it for. Definitely not have upvoted it, but still no downvote. Then the answer mentioned considering it an option to ask the teacher about becoming his second wife. This was completely ignoring the cultural European background given by OP so here this clearly deserves downvotes. And I understand the embarrassment this created BUT again, some one googling a similar problematic and not coming from central European oriented culture might have still find that answer useful. So I don't understand why it had to be deleted. Deleting answers is for them being rude, harmful offensive or just spam. But not just for them being not very useful (Or even for OP's specific context unuseful at all, as long they still address the topic as such.) Also considering time zones. That answer yesterday quickly reached the threshold for VTDing and was deleted within a few hours. So that answer had not even the chance to find supporters from another cultural background to counteract the downvotes (It probably wouldn't have gotten anyways) and this reminds me somewhat even of censorship.

• Could expressed attraction be an absolute prevention of someone feeling attraction to me?

  This post of me, had an answer advising some not so nice technique to achieve my goal. It had comments underneath it mentioning that the answer totally takes not the main problem of my OP into account. That was true. Still the answer in ti self advanced my field of view about what aspects play a role. So this answer totally wasn't answering my OP BUT it gave me useful insights so it was actually even helpful for ME (the OP!!!). And still the community deleted that answer for not fully addressing the main scope of my post. So that post isn't even available for me anymore.

This feels for me not like, how moderation should work in a free community driven moderation system.

And I think if we don't change anything, this will drive our scope policy into meaninglessness and on top scare away most of the community with different cultural background.

So my question, am I just seeing this too sensible, or can we agree that we are currently moderating somewhat too trigger happy?

CLARIFICATION

I am not asking if these decisions were right or wrong, or what the community might have should done here different. I am aware that most of my examples are correctly treat the way they were by our current policies. I am asking here if we really should understand our policy in the way we currently do, as I think this will lead us to be too critical about posts, which in fact have an interpersonal skill background. But lack the clear phrasings to point that out. Or even questions, that get evaluated by the kind of answer they generate and vise versa. I don't think it is on the long run helpful, to close a question, judged by the answers its getting nor to moderate answers other then by voting for the applicability of a solution. Even if a answer might be harmful as it is being downvoted to hell and having comments noting on the lack of applicability or background, should be enough for sane beings to be aware of the answers quality and still it might be helpful. So my point is simply, shouldn't we give some more leeway in specific cases? especially since as mentioned the current core community is very fast in reacting and removing despite we are from a quite common cultural background that limits our judgment ability about what might or might not be possibly helpful for others

Answer 1

First up, some corrections:

We shouldn't forget that the whole IPS topic is about opinions.

--> absolutely not. This is why we require backup in answers.

We don't want answers to challange the frame of OP?

--> We do allow frame challenges, as long as they fulfill the criteria for a good framechallenge

We want answers to have backup preferably based on hard data rather than on experiences one had

--> personal experience does count as back up.

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And now, to my actual answer to the question:

The scope of IPS is extremely fragile (please see shog9's rules for IPS) and we must not stray from it. This stack is actually about Interpersonal Skills, not solutions to interpersonal problems, but that line can be somewhat blurry. In order to keep this stack alive, we need to enforce some strict guidelines that seem strange when your perception of the stack is that it solves your problems you have with other people. This stack is not about problem solving, which is why we don't allow "What should I do" questions, as they are ultimately asking how to solve a problem that they face. What this stack is about, is how to apply certain interpersonal skills to achieve an interpersonal goal.

IMO we are not moderating strictly enough, and the main problem that I see is that too many users don't know the actual scope of this stack.

If we don't close questions that are out of scope, other users will think those questions are okay here and will keep on asking those kind of questions.

Answer 2

TL;DR: Are we too trigger happy? I don't think so. Do we need to make exceptions to our policies? No. What we can do is comment a bit more, a bit more elaborate perhaps, and try to figure out a way to get more people to engage in actually improving their posts.

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First off, a little note. You wrote in a comment underneath your own question:

But what I really disagree with is more the deleting of answers as we currently do. But since I couldn‘t refer to the deleted answers I was thinking about, I chose questions instead, in which I saw the same behavioral moderation pattern I suspect causing the deletion of answers I am not agreeing with.

As your post is using questions as examples, this answer may focus a bit too much on questions too. But I see no way to address the 'behavioral moderation pattern of answers that you disagree with' as your post doesn't have answers as examples. I know you regularly visit chat, if you have a question on which you see an answer you think shouldn't be deleted, I'd like to ask you to contact a mod, we can provide you with a screenshot of the answer so you can build a meta post around it.

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Now, let me try to address some parts of your question:

So speaking of Questions, here are a few examples of questions, I agree they are to some degree unclear/problematic. But I am not sure if they really should have been closed.

It's okay to not be sure if something should have been closed. It's one of the reasons the close-vote queue has a 'skip' button and why it (almost) always takes 5 people to close a post. We have a post on How do I write a good question? that may clarify things a bit for you, and the Good Subjective, Bad Subjective blog post also gives some good points on what a good subjective question should look like.

Looking at the questions you linked, I feel they were rightfully closed by the community:

• Is it rude to ask someone where they are from originally? and Is it OK to stop saying hi to people that you have no interest in? Were closed, because they're old questions, both with a lot of answers. You're totally right in saying that just the mention of the word 'rude' or 'is it okay' shouldn't be an insta-close reason, and I'd argue that if either question were posted right now, we should edit it to just focus on the 'better phrasing/handling' part. Right now though, it has a lot of answers that focus heavily on the 'whether or not it is rude/okay' part, and they would either be invalidated by an edit, or give off the impression that it's okay to argue whether or not something is rude/okay when someone asks for a better way to phrase/handle something. It's okay for such questions to be closed as off-topic.

• How to avoid embarrassment if I forget to bring my wallet on a date? (now deleted) We already discussed this (now deleted) questions in comments here. I still stand by my comments there and the one I left on the question:

  I'd like to know what Interpersonal Skill you'd like our help with. Interpersonal Skills are the behaviours you use to interact with other people. Although you said the 'situation became embarrassing', could you perhaps try and narrow down the interaction you'd like help with? Was it the interaction with the restaurant staff or your girlfriend, was there something you feel you did (other than forgetting your wallet) related to your own Interpersonal Skills that made you feel embarrassed?

  IPS is not a general 'solve this situation/feeling for me' site. It could've been a good question, but putting it on hold pending further details on the interaction taking place was the right call.

• How to tell my violin teacher who's interested in me that I'm actually married after I sent positive signals back for months? From what I can see here, there are 5 different points people would like clarification on. The last of those comments was made a week before the question actually got put on hold. And it's put on hold because people would like to see those details, because they matter. If there's that many points people would like clarification on, I don't disagree with closing the post for a while.

Remember that commenting, editing and putting a question on-hold are all done to help people get the best answers we can offer. It's no fun for the asker to get answers suggesting solutions that won't work because the answerer didn't know there was a circumstance invalidating their answer. It's no fun and a waste of time for someone to write an answer just to have the asker say 'this isn't helpful, I forgot to tell you but this is never going to work because of X'.

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I am asking here if we really should understand our policy in the way we currently do, as I think this will lead us to be too critical about posts, which in fact have an interpersonal skill background.

I think we should definitely stick with our policies. This site is about InterpersonalS Skills, not 'everyday life situations'. Just having a 'interpersonal skill background' doesn't count. If the interpersonal skill part is in the background, it's up to our community to bring it to the foreground. Write comments, make edits, and put on-hold if you need more information from the OP. If there only is an interpersonal skill background, the actual interpersonal skill question is likely to lack some details, which is why it's in the background.

But lack the clear phrasings to point that out.

Edits, edits, edits... and comments. Just a lack of clear phrasing isn't a close reason anywhere on SE, unless it's so bad that people can't understand it at all (then it's 'unclear what you're asking').

Or even questions, that get evaluated by the kind of answer they generate and vise versa.

This is a bit of a hard one. The Good Subjective, Bad Subjective blog post offers six guidelines for good subjective questions, out of those 6 there's 4 that touch on the kind and quality of answers a good subjective question is to invite. So yes, there is a correlation between questions and the kinds of answers they generate.

And there's the thing about those two old questions I mentioned above. Sometimes, it's easier to just close the old post as off-topic than rewriting both the post and it's answers, fishing out every off-topic bit, leaving answers that perhaps aren't fleshed out too well anymore and then need further editing by their original writers to add personal experience or reasoning... It's not something to be done lightly, it's not something to be done on just a trigger word, but it's something to always consider: The effort and quality of what's left after editing vs. closing it as off-topic.

I don't think it is on the long run helpful, to close a question, judged by the answers its getting nor to moderate answers other then by voting for the applicability of a solution. Even if a answer might be harmful as it is being downvoted to hell and having comments noting on the lack of applicability or background, should be enough for sane beings to be aware of the answers quality and still it might be helpful.

Answers should be moderated for quite a bit more than their applicability to others. Again, I'd like to refer you to that blog post on good subjective questions. Answers should be about more than opinions and should actually answer the question as it is asked. If the only thing that answer lacks is applicability to e.g. a cultural background, then yes, it may be downvoted. If it doesn't answer the question, if it's low quality, if it's more opinion or doesn't meet any of the high-level guidelines in that blog post, it's better to perhaps edit, comment and delete. Answers can always be undeleted if they're edited into shape, after all.

So my point is simply, shouldn't we give some more leeway in specific cases? especially since as mentioned the current core community is very fast in reacting and removing despite we are from a quite common cultural background that limits our judgment ability about what might or might not be possibly helpful for others.

I don't think we should give more leeway. My personal criteria for deletion is not necessarily whether or not this might be helpful. I try to judge them by whether or not they live up to what's expected from questions and answers on subjective sites (which is quite a lot, I agree). Answers that e.g. don't include any Interpersonal Skills may not be unhelpful, but should be deleted nonetheless from underneath questions about Interpersonal Skills.

I don't think moderation is too trigger happy. I do think that a lot of things end up rightfully closed and deleted, but then they remain closed and deleted, and that the last part is problematic. But instead of relaxing standards, we should find a way to engage people to actually improve their posts.

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Answer 3

As Cashbee already made some correction, I won't make them again. So, here is what I want to say:

I don't like closing question for being too broad when there is a clearly identified goal (maybe, I, too, should write a meta about that) and that's why I didn't vote to close the "violin teacher" one. The comminuty voted to close it and I don't have a problem with that. However, I think this question should, at least, have a comment that tells OP what they can do to have the question reopened.

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I voted to closed the "is it rude" question because some answer where clearly opinion-based only which lead me to thing there was a problem with the way the question was formulated. However, if someone come up with a clever edit that fix this issue and remove the opinion-based part, I will be happy to vote for reopen.

However, you do have a point and I should have left a comment for why I voted to close and what OP (or someone else) can do to have the question reopened.

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(I'm most specificaly talking about your second answer example here, but it might alos apply to your first answer example as well)

I definitively believe that not properly backed up answer should be deleted because the advises that are given could be terribly harmful. However, I'm open to the possibility to only deleted the not backup part and not the whole answer is there is some properly backed up stuff in the answer (as long as it still provide an answer).

I this case, whether I think the advise is good or not is irrelevant and I try do not take this into account when deciding to flag for "Not an answer". Even if I trully believe an answer is good, without the proper backed up, the answer could be missused and do terrible damage to a relationship. So no, I don't think we are too strict with that. I think we aren't enought!

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So, to me, the only problem with have with moderation is that we aren't lefting enough comment. (And that we don't have enough people moderationg according to your guidelines, but that's another problem)