Why is review only available to 500+ reputation

Question

Previously, review was available for those with 125 reputation or above. The reasoning seemed to be that 125 was enough to downvote, which is the last of the possible review actions (downvote, upvote, edit, comment, flag) that a user can receive. What's the new reasoning for 500 reputation? Is this just on Arqade or is it everywhere (I only participate on Arqade)?

A brilliant answer would be a link to the previous discussion on this. This could be a link to Meta.SO (if this policy covers multiple sites), which doesn't seem linked anywhere. From Arqade, I can find Meta.Arqade and vice versa, but there doesn't seem any link to the Meta Meta site. Since I don't know if this is an Arqade policy or a more general policy, I'm hoping that someone can at least resolve that part of the question.

Presumably there was some issue with reviews by those between 125 and 500 reputation, but it's unclear to me what that issue (or issues) was. If there's a problem with reviewing, I'd like to know how to address it.

I'm less interested in generating new discussion about this and more interested in finding the old discussion. Hopefully there are people on Meta.Arqade who knew about this before it happened and can link to the relevant discussion, be it in Meta.SO or Chat or wherever.

Answer 1

Grace explains the problem:

As determined from earlier discussions, the retag privilege serves a lot more confusion and a lot less of its benefit due to the suggested edit system. It must be done away with. It will be done away with. ♪

In light of this decided course of action, we're going to need a new snack for the road between "Create Tags" at 300 reputation and "Established User" at 1000 reputation. We'd like your help in thinking about some ideas on what would be a nice privilege to sit at this level. Since we're... a bit dry on our end.

Laura explains why they chose the review queue for the "snack":

Some users who participated in the review queues at 125 reputation will now be unable to do so, but we ran a query before making this change, and most reviewers have more than 500 rep anyway. Philosophically, we agree that it makes more sense for these queues to be accessible by people who have been on the site for a little bit longer – especially for the First Posts queue.

Here's why we chose this suggestion over the others posted here:

• The SE team all thought it was a good idea. We were split on whether some of the other suggestions were a good idea, but were in agreement on this one.
• It was easy to implement. You guys gave us some food for thought, but some of the other suggestions would take a lot more discussion, planning, and developer time to implement. We'll keep them in mind for the future, though.
• We weren't convinced that adding back the retag privilege made sense.

apaul34208 links to The “First Posts” review queue is ineffective and toothless, possibly as a result of badge farming.

As it stands, the "First Posts" review queue is empty on Stack Overflow. As I seldom review that queue, it isn't empty because I have no posts to review; it's empty because, well it's empty.

However, in reviewing some of the 800 flags in the 10k Flag Queue, I came across so, so many posts by first users, which are blatantly low quality/ NAA, most of which had no comments at all, and those that did, I'm doubtful whether they were added during the review of the post in the "First Posts" queue (if it ever reached there).

It may have been an SO-only problem (although we've also had exceedingly awesome reviewers on Arqade too), but raising the rep required for the action reduces abuse of the queue.