How are the new rep benchmarks working?

Question

I'm active on Seasoned Advice and was wondering what happened to rep benchmarks as we came out of beta. I asked a related question on our meta, but thought I'd pose a slightly different one here.

I see that now you guys are out of beta, the rep benchmarks have moved to be inline with SOFU.

It might be a little early to ask this question, but how's that working out?

I see from the users page that only one member of your community actually has the ability to vote to close a question (rather than a mod who insta-closes). And no member can access the tools section anymore (no one is even close). So it seems you've lost the ability to close questions as a community.

Have you noticed any effect of that yet?

Answer 1

I think the perspective of a non-mod could be useful, but here's my take on it.

It is something I've raised a couple times. I think the main issue is that the community needs to vote. Our achieved rep scores are lower than I think they should be. Voting is something the community needs in order to survive. (I'm working on writing a post to try and encourage voting.) Personally, I (and I believe the other mods) are using their binding close votes more than previously. We are seeing a small increase in the number of flags as they are being used to alert us in lieu of close votes, and also looking at comments that may indicate issues also. We didn't have all that many people that could close throughout our public beta anyway, so it isn't a huge change. Mods have always been involved in closing questions here, and we need to get the community to vote so that mods aren't relied on for this function that should be community-supported.