Preemptively protecting hot network questions

Question

I asked a question last night, and it was received pretty well, to the point that it managed to get into the Hot Network Question (HNQ) list. But as a result of this, a moderator protected the question, with this justification:

I am routinely protecting hot network questions about hot-button issues as a preemptive measure. We made a lot of bad experience in the past with people posting inappropriate answers to HNQs and still receiving a lot of upvotes for them (like this). This gives them and everyone else a wrong impression about how this site works.

If you would like to discuss this further, please create a new question on meta. Comments on questions should be about the content of the question.

I understand that the HNQ questions are often protected, to avoid new users from other communities to post answers that the community evaluates as low quality. This is amplified by the fact that most HNQ visitors do have the ability to upvote, but not to downvote, so even low quality answers will get at least some upvotes, that won't be easily balanced out by downvotes from active contributors of this site.

With this specific question though, I feel that protecting it was not strictly necessary, in the sense that all answers posted so far are on-topic, and none have been deleted.

In addition, because the specific question deals with a political issue between countries with a very small population, I am afraid that by protecting the question, we are silencing some of the opinions of the involved parties, since it is not very likely to find a "representative" of each point of view, that has eared 10 points on politics.se.

So what does the community feel about protecting questions like this? Does the risk of having upvoted off-topic answers outweigh the possibility of losing the some of the points-of-view from the answer section?

Do consider that users with no account with more than 200 points, are totally unable to express their views, as they can't even add comments on the question and the answers.

Answer 1

While this was protected by a moderator (more privileges than a mere user), it's worth noting that normally you can't just run around protecting questions. Typically they need some low quality answers by new users to meet that threshold (and if enough of those are deleted via review, Community will step in and do the deed itself)

That having been said, I agree with the crux here

We made(sic) a lot of bad experience in the past with people posting inappropriate answers to HNQs and still receiving a lot of upvotes for them

While I understand your concern, a common problem we have is that people come here and rant about Politics. The answer that has been split opinion reads like a rant at first glance (lots of assertions, no supporting quotes or links). But imagine that you start getting lots of answers of this length and content (I'm taking a quote out of context to make a point)

Just like the Phillipines having been under USA control for so long, and once they got a leader that wanted to follow their own path, the USA was not happy about it. So its really about Big Players being bullies to the small guys.

I'm pretty sure you wouldn't read that and go "Hey, that answered my question!" But that's what Protected is designed to prevent. A lot of new posters do that without understanding that's not how SE works. Protected simply means you've earned 10 rep. That means 2 upvotes on a question OR 1 upvote on an answer (association bonuses don't count). That's not some crazy barrier, but it does stop the one-post wonders.

Answer 2

I've unprotected the question.

Having it protected while it was featured in the HNQ list (and was attracting poor answers) was reasonable. Now that it dropped off the list, however, there's little reason to keep it protected. I also took this opportunity to unprotect a handful of other old questions.

That said, I am not optimistic that the question will receive better answers than the ones it currently has. Its subject matter is delicate, and the question is a bit open-ended. Historically, we haven't done a great job maintaining such questions on our site.

As the OP, you'll be the first to know if the question starts accumulating poor answers again. Please let us know - with a flag - if that happens.

Answer 3

I feel that protecting it was not strictly necessary, in the sense that all answers posted so far are on-topic, and none have been deleted.

This is what pro-active means, and could be taken as evidence that this policy was working.

But there is one answer by a newcomer and it has attracted significant downvotes (about 1/2 as many as upvotes at this time) and some (in my opinion valid) criticism. I don't expect it will be deleted, but I do expect it will continue to attract enough upvotes to cover any downvotes, giving the impression of being well received. At the same time criticism questioning its factualness has as many upvotes as the answer and there hasn't been any editing. I read this as a sign that the normal SE community mechanisms are not being effective, which is when a mod is expected to do something.

I can't see the history of votes so I'm not clear if this was as apparent when the question was protected, but it seems to me the protection wasn't premature. It is sad to exclude potential answers from new users, but this site is delicate because of how close to opinion even good answers often are.