2019: a year in moderation

Question

It's New Year's Day in Stack Exchange land...

A distinguishing characteristic of these sites is how they are moderated:

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

While there certainly are Moderators here, a significant amount of the moderation is done by ordinary people, using the privileges they've earned by virtue of their contributions to the site. Each of you contributes a little bit of time and effort, and together you accomplish much.

As we enter a new year, let's pause and reflect, taking a moment to appreciate the work that we do here together. And what could be more festive than a big pile of numbers? So here is a breakdown of moderation actions performed on User Experience over the past 12 months:

                 Action                  Moderators Community¹
---------------------------------------- ---------- ----------
Users suspended²                                  0         15
Users destroyed³                                 20          0
Tasks reviewed⁴: Suggested Edit queue            39      1,179
Tasks reviewed⁴: Reopen Vote queue                3        134
Tasks reviewed⁴: Low Quality Posts queue          4        661
Tasks reviewed⁴: Late Answer queue                0        323
Tasks reviewed⁴: First Post queue                22      1,839
Tasks reviewed⁴: Close Votes queue              149      1,771
Questions unprotected                             0          1
Questions reopened                                4          1
Questions protected                               4         22
Questions migrated                               19          0
Questions flagged⁵                               24        892
Questions closed                                346        321
Question flags handled⁵                         291        624
Posts unlocked                                    0          6
Posts undeleted                                   4         21
Posts locked                                      0        130
Posts deleted⁶                                  237      1,304
Posts bumped                                      0      1,308
Comments undeleted                                1          0
Comments flagged                                  0      1,092
Comments deleted⁷                               198      1,360
Comment flags handled                           172        921
Answers flagged                                  32        796
Answer flags handled                            561        267
All comments on a post moved to chat              2          0

Footnotes

¹ "Community" here refers both to the membership of User Experience 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? I posted a similar report here last year: 2018: 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

Wishing you all a happy new year...

Answer 1

I noticed that in the corresponding post for last year there was just one comment relating to what this data means to the community and how it compares to the previous year (asked by me). And since joining the group of moderators I thought it is only fitting that I try to answer the question myself with a quick analysis of the results.

Of course, I am not of the view that metrics are self-evident of the changes that have taken place over time, although they can provide some useful indicators of some high level trends for the community as a whole.

For those that have been around on UXSE and are moderators in other communities, I would be very interested in your thoughts on what this means for the community.

Regardless, I would like to invite people to continue providing comments and feedback so we can keep improving the community so that it serves the people who value and contribute to it.