2018: 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. To that end, here is how the moderation done here on Project Management breaks down by activity over the past 12 months:

                 Action                  Moderators Community¹
---------------------------------------- ---------- ----------
Users suspended²                                  0          7
Users destroyed                                   1          0
Tasks reviewed³: Suggested Edit queue           136        668
Tasks reviewed³: Reopen Vote queue                0         55
Tasks reviewed³: Low Quality Posts queue          0         75
Tasks reviewed³: Late Answer queue                0        155
Tasks reviewed³: First Post queue                 0        668
Tasks reviewed³: Close Votes queue                3        410
Tags merged                                       2          0
Tag synonyms proposed                             3          0
Tag synonyms created                              2          0
Questions reopened                                0          1
Questions protected                               0          4
Questions migrated                                3          0
Questions flagged⁴                                2        120
Questions closed                                145         34
Question flags handled⁴                          81         41
Posts undeleted                                   2          2
Posts locked                                      0         15
Posts deleted⁵                                  119        187
Posts bumped                                      0        734
Comments flagged                                  0        144
Comments deleted⁶                                75        184
Comment flags handled                            57         87
Bounties canceled                                 1          0
Answers flagged                                   2        217
Answer flags handled                            158         61

Footnotes

¹ "Community" here refers both to the membership of Project Management 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 This counts every review that was submitted (not skipped) - so the 3 suggested edits reviews needed to approve an edit would count as 3, the goal being to indicate the frequency of moderation actions. This also applies to flags, etc.

⁴ Includes close flags (but not close or reopen votes).

⁵ This ignores numerous deletions that happen automatically in response to some other action.

⁶ This includes comments deleted by their own authors (which also account for some number of handled comment flags).

Wishing you all a happy new year...

Answer 1

Really liked the stats we got, Shog! I believe our community is steadily improving along the years.

I got curious with Danny's question and decided to dig down a bit in our number of users and levels and here goes the analysis I got.

My reading of these numbers are:

• It's really hard to engage new users to the point they contribute back to the community and thus, increasing their own reputation
• The reduction of new users since 2016 (1st Graph) is in my opinion due to the decreased perception of project management as a dedicated role (and increased empowerment of self-managed teams), so management questions are being raised elsewhere on StackExchange (this should be a discussion in itself in a separated meta post)
• We have a bunch of community heroes moderating the site, and in the name of the diamond mods I'd like to thank you all for your restless, continuous efforts!

As a side note, worth to remember that there's https://pm.stackexchange.com/site-analytics for users with 5k+ reputation.

---

Graph #1 - New user creation per year, including 2019/2020 forecast

Graph #2 - User creation and their reputation from 2011 to 2019

Graph #3 - Count of users per Reputation, including users with 1 or 101 reputation

Graph #4 - Count of users per Reputation, not considering users with less than 200 reputation. Worth to notice the comparison of the peaks on the 300 and 500 points users to the previous graph!