Recently Luis went SPACESHIP and brought the 1000-or-so items in the review close queue down to zero. A truly epic effort that I'm sincerely grateful for.

Shortly after, he posted on Meta about his frustrations with the number of questions in there that had already been answered (in some cases years ago) that people were still wringing their hands over, or voting to close (even brand new questions) without having asked for clarification or detail.

What he got in return was a visit from the Meta Police. A local cop pulled in support from MSO/MSE and they ended up in a mix between a syntactical argument, an "Oh but the rules —insert link to 3yo meta posts— say this" and a fight over what the system is supposed to do. It seemed like, deliberately or otherwise, everybody replying missed the very important point Luis was making.

I wanted to reprise the post in some form because I have been saying the same things for years. Experienced users shouldn't find it surprising: The review system puts so much emphasis on coddling old, already-dealt-with questions that it's suffocating us. I'm not saying it can't ever work but it relies on people and we don't have a limitless supply of those.

I think some people struggle to understand the scale of the issue. At the moment we are failing to answer or close 3000-5000 questions a month. That's our priority here.

Instead of doing that though, we have people submitting poor close votes, each of which uses up to another 4 votes from other users. We average around 40 seconds a review so including the initial submissions, we can pour over there minutes into something. Longer if people are careful. Even longer if that goes to meta. Even to leave stuff open (which in my experience is at least a third), we're committing vast amounts of people time.

This adds up. 40 seconds per review, ~150 reviews a day. That's 50 hours a month going on review.

I'm certainly not saying all review is bad (and neither did Luis) but if you only take one thing away from this exchange, let it be that you should just be more thoughtful about what it is you're submitting into the review system. If it's old and answered, really ask yourself if that deserves taking another 4 people off today's questions.

It has been mentioned that a the reason a lot of old questions end up back in review after a couple of years is because somebody or something bumps them onto the front page. The solution for this is really simple, don't use the front page. Hang out on the New Questions page and you'll be giving most of your attention to the right questions.