Should moderators single-handedly close questions based on their personal/subjective opinion?

Question

Should moderators single-handedly close questions based on their personal/subjective opinion?

Some moderators on this site practice closing questions that they judge to be off-topic without waiting for 5 close votes from regular users. On the one hand, it is reasonable that moderators should be given such power to discard questions with obvious context problems - written in incoherent language or not dealing with the community subject. On the other hand, judgements about whether

• a question asks for the internal motivations of people, how specific individuals would behave in hypothetical situations or predictions for future events

or

• a question tries to promote or discredit a specific political cause, group or politician

are necessarily subjective, and better left to the democratic procedures (i.e., 5 votes).

The recent example is How likely is it that Putin does not know what he is doing in Ukraine 2022? (Update: This questionw as initially closed by a moderator, reopened by 5 reopen votes and again closed by 5 close votes. Thus, the opinion of the community is split in this case.)

Answer 1

Should moderators single-handedly close questions based on their personal/subjective opinion?

Yes. I don't think it matters who closes a question, what matters is that off-topic questions get closed. In many cases, it's better for questions to be closed sooner rather than later so that they can be improved before someone tries to answer them.

As for moderators acting on their personal opinion, I guess it's a matter of framing. All our moderators have been around for a few years, we know how the site is scoped and what kind of questions are off-topic or even problematic. We're also aware of the single close vote, so I trust that I and the other mods carefully weigh whether a question should actually be closed before casting that binding close vote. Another way of framing it would be:

Should moderators single-handedly close questions based on their extensive experience on the site?

Then all of a sudden I think it sounds a lot more reasonable.

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Of course, that doesn't mean moderators always get it right. Just like the 5 vote closure can be overturned, so can moderator closures. I think the best recourse is to vote to reopen or to raise the specific question here on meta.

In the case of the question you mention, I think it calls for speculation. It asks about President Putin's competence in leading the war in Ukraine and it also touches on his mental competence. On the first part, we can only look at his actions. We have no access to his actual decision making process.

The same problem goes for his mental competence. Whenever we see him in public, like any leader, he's putting on a performance. So even if he acts crazy, we cannot say for sure whether he is actually crazy or whether he is trying to portray himself as such. For example, one reason to act crazy might be to be less predictable in brinkmanship.

Answer 2

I don't see this closure as particularly controversial. The question has problems from 3 different angles:

• it asks multiple questions
• it self-answers some of those in the Q itself, so a degree of "push", coupled with soliciting agreement with the asker's position
• it substantially overlaps other questions in the objective sub-questions (which were linked by the mod in their comments)

Even regular users with a gold badge in a tag can (or at least could, last time I checked) single-handedly close a question as duplicate.

Glossing over the title that seems to be asking about Putin's state of mind, in rather broad terms:

How likely is it that Putin does not know what he is doing in Ukraine 2022?

The body of the question is structured something like (quoting)

what benefit is the Ukraine war to Putin and Russia?

Followed by the asker's self-answer, followed by

So, Putin's actions could possibly be viewed rather rationally, couldn't they?

That's generally a bad (leading) question to ask.

Glossing over the form issues, the body ultimately asks if Putin's war is "rational" which is going to be a subjective question to some degree. One could answer that it is from Putin's nationalistic "Russian world" and NATO-phobic perspective. (The short and quickly accepted answer to the Q can be summarized as "yeah, he's rational, he wants the Donbas and recognition of Crimea as Russian".) Or that it's not rational from others' perspective, as it rolls back 30 years of post cold war détente and substantially reduces Russia's integration in the world economy. The Q doesn't exactly narrow it down to one perspective, although it seems to biased towards Putin's perspective. And on that issue, we have a more straightforward (prior) question that just asks about Putin's stated goals for the war. And some others that asked about his gripes with Ukraine and NATO.

Answer 3

Ever since this war started we've had a number of questions about negative subjective attributes of either Putin or his government.

Basically, "is Putin a bad guy?". With the expectation that "reasonable people" would agree. Before that we had similar questions with Trump ("Is Trump a fascist?").

These are not questions that are very suited to SE.Politics because there's no objective way to define that any given person is a "bad guy", "idiot", "fascist", "yes-man".

Not answerable: "Is Putin a bad guy?"

Answerable: "Is Putin in charge of armed forces carrying out war crimes?"

Many of us will agree re the war crimes and can point to evidence and objective definitions. Some will disagree and state that we might be subject to propaganda. Some will happily segue into Iraq War whataboutism. These are facts or at least claimed facts.

Saying "Putin does not know what he's doing" is not as easily quantifiable. Had it worked out like Crimea in 2014, he'd be looking pretty clever right now. "Genius!" some even claimed early on.

The problem is that, as satisfying as it to call Putin an idiot, or his staff yes-men or whatever - and I tend to agree with both propositions - there is no objective way to answer this question. It just becomes catharsis for calling him an a**hole.

I would agree with the OP on this meta question that we have a voting mechanism and maybe unilateral moderator closings weren't necessary. Questions that deserve immediate moderator closure (deletion actually) might include low-quality bigoted questions that could reasonably be expected to distress people viewing them. We've had those and immediate moderator deletion, before too much of whatever message is being posted gets viewed, is a good thing.

This is not one such question.

Some other Ukraine-related questions deserve more closing IMHO, such as discussing Kremlin propaganda points (Was Ukraine about to invade?). Other people did not agree and... such is life.

Still, this is a bad question and I would have voted to close. It's also such a textbook example of asking for opinions that closing it immediately did not hurt much.

Answer 4

On the flagship Stack Exchange site, Stack Overflow, the moderators use the mod hammer (the ability to single-handedly close the question) rarely, when normalized by the (huge) number of questions they get per minute. I hardly see the mod hammer used on the [python] and [perl] tags.

Another site, perhaps more similar to Politics SE, called Parenting SE, has also seen a relatively less active use of the mod hammer. And boy, do they get their share of opinion-only, off-topic, not-an-answers, frame challenges and low-quality posts! In spades! But the community there does most of the moderation. And the moderators are not silenced: they often cast their vote - but as the last of the 3 or 5 votes, which makes the moderators more like ordinary users. Note that only (a) spam and (b) overly offensive brief posts with cursing and name calling are well-justified exceptions; that's where the Parenting SE mods truly shine: quick and firm. Just the way it should be.

In my experience across the various Stack Exchange sites, Politics SE seems to have the curious habit of overuse of the mod hammer. If you disagree with this statement, please do bring data to the discussion (with raw data included). The various explanations of the necessity of swinging the mod hammer, such as the war, the assorted biases of the posters, and all that seem to me poor excuses to the overly frequent use of the single-handed question closure by anyone - especially the moderators.

Moderators should primarily moderate the discussion, which they do, and for which we all should respect them and be grateful to them and thank them sincerely and profusely and often. Moderators are called moderators for a reason. And their service to our community is essential and super valuable. But single-handed closure should be reserved for truly egregious cases.

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By the way, it has been brought to my attention (see comments above) that some users verbally abuse the moderators and engage in name-calling. This is wrong on so many levels, and should stop right away. I hope that these cases are considered some of the worst rule violations on this site, and that the offending users get disciplined right away (and yes, single-handedly in this case).

Answer 5

As far as I - as the author of the referenced question - am concerned, I consider it quite useful if, on sites like this, there are people who have excess power, because that unmasks the alleged nobleness of the cause, especially as like in this case, where there was an apparent "eagerness" to close the question and, furthermore, remove all comments that would have been able to correct the moderator's gross misunderstanding or, possibly, even bias.

Besides always appreciating downvotes and closings on Politics.SE because they give me a kind of "street credibility" for my self-esteem, a feeling that I must have hit the nail on the head, if a certain category of people vigorously opposes my question, it is also deeply satisfying for me to see that politics is just as ugly and inconsistent as it seems at first sight, and that is already being confirmed at the level of mere discussion about politics.

So, no worries, although I feel a bit sad for others that don't get the chance to draw the maximum out of my question, and, of course, to express their well-justified dissent. But then again, this is obviously not the right forum, at least not as far as it is under control of the owner of the site.