Can a/the mod explain why the quadrillion question was removed from HNQ?

Question

https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/posts/49969/revisions

Is it really that bad of a q? Why?

Answer 1

The question is fine. The attention politics questions get from the HNQ traffic is arguably not fine, and indeed a thing I've railed against. Just in the 3.5 hours it was on the list I had to delete 8 comments. Further, there's two unsourced answers that probably should be deleted, but I didn't want to appear heavy handed, so I simply made a post notice for now. Nearly all were from non-regulars (interpreted as "from hnq traffic").

Not knowing this feature existed until after I was a mod, I'm experimenting with using it now. There's not a lot of guidance from SE on when to use it, but my goal is to curb likely moderator intervention increases in the short term future. In other words, I expected more off-topic comments and poor answers that we'd have to delete over the next day or two.

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Three days later, it seems to have worked. I just went through the page again, no flags, and only 2 comments that needed to be deleted (pseudo answers). It's true that this is one instance, so we'd need to compare to past instances where it remained on the list to be "skeptically minded" about it. I'm sure we'd have plenty to choose from. Also, it could perhaps be argued that removing it from the list put a big wet blanket on the whole thing (harmed the site). Indeed, activity on the page is low since removal, but it's reasonable to assume regular users probably interacted the same with it. Maybe it wasn't that interesting of a question by their standards. It's difficult to qualify good traffic from bad traffic, but we're trying.