[kstrauser]

Not OP but I think it’s the same problem. Mods got a pat on the back for “curating” (i.e. quickly closing) incoming questions, so they leaned far too far toward closing them ASAP for specious reasons because it rewarded themselves.

Sure, there was a whole appeals process you could go through if you had infinite time and patience to beg the same cohort for permission, pretty please, to ask the question on the ask-the-question website, but the graph of people willing to do so over time looks a lot like their traffic graph.

[fabian2k]

There is no reward for closing questions.

The gamification is mostly via reputation, and only asking, answering (and very limited editing) grant reputation.

[kstrauser]

I disagree. Look at the moderator election threads[0] and a good chunk of the would-be mods’ stories are demonstrating how good they are at deleting and flagging and downvoting content.

And that stuff is important, but when it becomes a metric to optimize and brag about…

[0]https://stackoverflow.com/election/16