Switching to 3-vote close/reopen

Question

As has been mentioned during the election process, there is the possibility to switch to three (instead of five) votes to close/reopen questions. This should allow for easier action by non-moderators; reaching five votes can be a tall order, especially in the reopen queue. I don't anticipate this will entirely eliminate the need for moderators to act, but hopefully it'll spread the load more evenly and allow for effectively more community participation. From my experience, implementing this e.g. on Seasoned Advice works quite well.

I'll leave this question for about a month (taking into consideration that the overall participation on Coffee SE is low), and then as long as overall sentiments are neutral to positive here, I can pass this along to the CMs to make the actual change.

So, what do we as a community think?

Answer 1

Yes that sounds good to me. It allows the community more opportunity to close and reopen questions without any downsides that I could think of for our small community. Us mods can still control closing as we do now, so it only improves the broader community's ability to control closing questions which is a good thing. :)

Answer 2

I imagine a moderator being reluctanct to vote to close a Question or delete a post since that takes away an element of Community participation. The moderator vote is binding, so waiting until the vote is otherwise already a final one makes sense.

Reducing the final vote from fifth to third will thus be expeditious in a Community with a slow pace. So I'm in agreement with making the change.

Answer 3

I reviewed the request and the close and reopen trends for your site. It looks like your site is a good candidate to have the threshold lowered. So I have lowered the vote threshold to 3.