2020: a year in moderation

Question

As we say goodbye to the old year and welcome the new one, we have a tradition of sharing moderation stats for the past 12 months.

As most of you here are aware, sites on the Stack Exchange network are moderated somewhat differently to other sites on the web:

We designed the Stack Exchange network engine to be mostly self-regulating, in that we amortize the overall moderation cost of the system across thousands of teeny-tiny slices of effort contributed by regular, everyday users.
-- A Theory of Moderation

That doesn't eliminate the need for having moderators altogether, but it does mean that the bulk of moderation work is carried out by regular folks. Every bit of time and effort y'all contribute to the site gives you access to more privileges you can use to help in this effort, all of which produce a cumulative effect that makes a big difference.

So as we welcome 2021, and in keeping with tradition, let us look back at what we accomplished as a community... by looking at some exciting stats. Below is a breakdown of moderation actions performed on Interpersonal Skills over the past 12 months:

Action	Moderators	Community¹
Users suspended²	18	19
Users destroyed³	50	0
Users deleted	15	0
Users contacted	26	0
Tasks reviewed⁴: Suggested Edit queue	69	137
Tasks reviewed⁴: Reopen Vote queue	35	117
Tasks reviewed⁴: Low Quality Posts queue	63	674
Tasks reviewed⁴: Late Answer queue	21	38
Tasks reviewed⁴: First Post queue	66	396
Tasks reviewed⁴: Close Votes queue	27	281
Tags merged	1	0
Revisions redacted	2	0
Questions reopened	9	3
Questions protected	2	22
Questions migrated	3	0
Questions flagged⁵	12	188
Questions closed	323	47
Question flags handled⁵	133	67
Posts unlocked	1	0
Posts undeleted	11	19
Posts locked	0	71
Posts deleted⁶	253	637
Posts bumped	0	18
Escalations to the Community Manager team	1	0
Comments undeleted	19	0
Comments flagged	40	400
Comments deleted⁷	1,508	321
Comment flags handled	406	34
Answers flagged	274	614
Answer flags handled	470	413
All comments on a post moved to chat	5	0

Footnotes

¹ "Community" here refers both to the membership of Interpersonal Skills without diamonds next to their names, and to the automated systems otherwise known as user #-1.

² The system will suspend users under three circumstances: when a user is recreated after being previously suspended, when a user is recreated after being destroyed for spam or abuse, and when a network-wide suspension is in effect on an account.

³ A "destroyed" user is deleted along with all that they had posted: questions, answers, comments. Generally used as an expedient way of getting rid of spam.

⁴ This counts every review that was submitted (not skipped) - so the 2 suggested edits reviews needed to approve an edit would count as 2, the goal being to indicate the frequency of moderation actions. This also applies to flags, etc.

⁵ Includes close flags (but not close or reopen votes).

⁶ This ignores numerous deletions that happen automatically in response to some other action.

⁷ This includes comments deleted by their own authors (which also account for some number of handled comment flags).

Further reading:

• Wanna see how these numbers have changed over time? We posted a similar report here last year: 2019: a year in moderation

• You can also check out this report on other sites

• Or peruse detailed information on the number of questions closed and reopened across all sites

A big thank you to Shog9 for writing the queries and script to facilitate fetching and posting this data to all the sites in the network, and to Brian for the subsequent work making the whole thing more user friendly.

Wishing everyone a happy 2021!

Answer 1

I was curious to know how much change compared to last year and especially: how much more or less work did the community did by itself compared to last year?

So I did this (on Excel):

NOTE: 'comm.' is abbreviation for 'community' and 'Mods' for 'Moderators'

Action	Mods 2019	comm. '19	% by comm. '19	Mods 2020	comm. 2020	% by comm. '20	Pt diff.
Users suspended	34	14	29,2	18	19	51,3	22,2
Users destroyed	56	0	0	50	0	0	0
Users deleted	9	0	0	15	0	0	0
Users contacted	57	0	0	26	0	0	0
Tasks reviewed: Suggested Edit queue	102	499	83	69	137	66,5	-16,5
Tasks reviewed: Reopen Vote queue	74	609	89	35	117	77	-12,2
Tasks reviewed: Low Quality Posts queue	45	2700	98,4	63	674	91,5	-6,9
Tasks reviewed: Late Answer queue	15	58	79,5	21	38	64,4	-15
Tasks reviewed: First Post queue	128	815	86,5	66	396	85,7	-0,7
Tasks reviewed: Close Votes queue	49	1311	96,4	27	281	91,2	-5,2
Tags merged	2	0	0	1	0	0	0
Revisions redacted	13	0	0	2	0	0	0
Questions reopened	26	38	59,4	9	3	25	-34,4
Questions protected	12	45	79	2	22	91,6	12,7
Questions migrated	4	1	20	3	0	0	-20
Questions flagged	34	385	92	12	188	94	2,1
Questions closed	366	274	42,8	323	47	12,7	-30
Question flags handled	295	125	29,8	133	67	33,5	3,7
Posts unlocked	2	5	71,4	1	0	0	-71,4
Posts undeleted	28	31	52,5	11	19	63,3	10,8
Posts locked	5	92	94,8	0	71	100	5
Posts deleted	339	1083	76	253	637	71,5	-4,6
Posts bumped	0	2	100	0	18	100	0
Escalations to the Community Manager team	13	0	0	1	0	0	0
Comments undeleted	71	0	0	19	0	0	0
Comments flagged	59	2624	97,8	40	400	91	-6,9
Comments deleted	5217	1047	16,7	1508	321	17,5	0,8
Comment flags handled	2304	379	14	406	34	7,7	-6,4
Answers flagged	416	1401	77	274	614	69,1	-7,9
Answer flags handled	725	1108	60,5	470	413	46,8	-13,7
All comments on a post moved to chat	3	0	0	5	0	0	0

If we look at the last column "point difference", we can see that a fair amount of numbers have a negative value. This means that, this year, the community did less (compare to the mods) than last year. And this is especially true for "question closed". Though, we (the community) did do better in some other areas.

I must say, I was afraid that, this year, the mods had to do a lot more work compare to the community. And yes, it is true that mods did do more than last year. If I do the sum of all the "point difference", I obtain -194.

However, I realize it could have been way worse and we, the community, aren't doing that bad after all.