Earlier today, the question Taking college classes to avoid student loan payments indefinitely was manually removed from the Hot Network Questions list by a mod.
Why was this done?
What criteria do our mods use when deciding to manually remove questions from the HNQ?
How often is this done to questions on our site?
Because not all questions are good. When the OP first posted
My sister-in-law is an idiot and has decided she wants to take part time college classes so she doesn't have to make payments on her private student loan
I resisted the impulse to close the question. Even after the kind edits, I took a moment to find -
From ConsumerFinance.gov
When do I need to start paying my private student loans? Unlike federal student loans, each private loan has its own repayment process.
Some private loans require payments while you are in school. Other private loans let you delay your first payment for a period of time – called a “grace period” – similar to the feature offered by most federal student loans. Contact your loan servicer for more information or refer to your original loan documents.
which ultimately became a case of "You should speak to the lender." You answered it basically that way. We still disagree about the value of HNQ, and I still maintain that some questions are best not promoted.
The other tool mods use is to protect a question when the attention from HNQ is welcome but it invites a flurry of comments and/or unhelpful answers. That was not the case here of course. This question was simply unanswerable as asked, and again, in my view, the right thing to do was leave it open, but not invite more attention to it.
This answer is a response to JTP's answer.
First, I agree that the question should not be closed or protected. The question is undoubtedly on-topic. And anything that could be construed as unkind was edited out of the question (not by a mod) less than 5 minutes from posting. So there really isn't a problem there, either.
I disagree with your assertion that this is not a good question. You insinuate that the question was too easy, that it only took you a moment to find the answer, but in fact, it is not obvious to everyone, and this is evidenced by the fact that an incorrect answer was posted before mine. You also call the question "unanswerable," which is also not true. Informing the OP that private loans do not have standard terms is indeed exactly the answer she needed. Remember that people post questions that they don't know the answer to. When a question is asked with a mistaken premise, that does not make it a bad question, and it does not make it unanswerable. The correct answer is to correct the premise and teach the OP something new. The OP apparently found my answer helpful, because she accepted it.
Now, let's talk about the HNQ. The HNQ is a way for our site to be promoted across the Stack Exchange network. Our site is not the most popular site on Stack Exchange, and by having links to questions on the HNQ, it brings new attention and participation to our site. Isn't that a good thing? It doesn't really even matter what the question is that is being linked. A user on Stack Overflow will read the title and find it interesting, and click on it, bringing them to our site. Then they read the question and perhaps learn something new, and perhaps see what else is on our site.
That is exactly the kind of free publicity we need. We should celebrate every time one of our questions trends, and it doesn't really matter what the question is. It costs us nothing.
When you manually remove a question from the HNQ, it does absolutely nothing positive for our site. You say you don't want to promote that question, but it's not like that means that another one of our questions that you do like will automatically appear. Trending happens organically and is out of our control. If you remove us from the HNQ, a question from a different site will appear in its place.
I can imagine a scenario where a particular question might need to be removed from the HNQ, but it would be very rare. We've talked about potentially removing "sugar daddy" questions from the HNQ as those could be seen as inappropriate when seen out of context on other sites. Maybe there would be some question in the future that would be an embarrassment to our site for some reason, and for whatever reason it could not be closed. But just you not liking a question is not enough, in my opinion, to sabotage this avenue of promotion of our site as a whole.
In my opinion, mods should not be attempting to use their power to remove questions from the HNQ to try to manipulate what gets promoted on the site. It is not possible; a mod cannot choose what will be popular, and removing something from the HNQ that is not causing a legitimate problem hurts the site.