What's with the low quality posts in perpetual limbo?

Question

Having just crossed the 2k rep milestone, I decided to help out by using the new reviewing powers someone thought to grant noobs like me. "Perhaps," I said to myself, "I can help relieve that enormous backlog of low quality posts that never seems to vanish."

Much to my surprise, most of these seem to have been reviewed, since I see comments left by high-rep people asking the author to reword the post. It seems, though, that often we get a one-time visitor who will never return to elaborate. I can't read minds, so I can't edit these to make them better. Yet they are not good enough to be accepted and cleared from the queue as-is. The third option is to delete (or vote to delete? I'm not sure how it works), but that seems a little harsh, especially as others have looked at this post and not deleted.

So, my question is: Is there anything for me to do here? Or do we just wait indefinitely for users to make posts better? Also: Is there any way to segregate posts a reviewer has commented on from those no one has seen? (Of course I expect the answer to that last one is "no," but I ask it for discussion purposes anyway.

Answer 1

Technically, we can't delete things which answer the question (even if they're wrong or short/low quality). At least, not by current rules.

You can always downvote those posts. Also, you may flag as "very low quality", and we moderators will deal with it (note: do not use flags to indicate wrong answers). Never be afraid to flag. It's not too bad if you have a few declined flags, as long as the majority is "helpful" flags.¹

Is there any way to segregate posts a reviewer has commented on from those no one has seen?

https://physics.stackexchange.com/review/low-quality-posts/history . This lists the posts that people have seen. Not exactly what you wanted, though. It's still productive at times to sift through the list, re-checking things.

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As a side note, my personal opinion is that posts like this and this ought to be deleted if not improved. (Yes, I keep tabs on the posts I've commented on that may need attention later ^.^). But we'd probably need a separate meta post for that².

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Also:

The queues are separate for everyone-- what looks like a "backlog" to you is a cleared queue to me :D

Certain actions in a queue --"leave open" in the close queue, "no action needed" (I think), "Looks good", etc have the power to remove posts from a queue for everyone, but that only happens if 2-3 users select it for the same post.

^{1. You can check you flag history here. On your profile, there is a link underneath your email/etc to the number of helpful flags--if you have any declined flags, there will be a red number next to it. Whenever a flag is declined, go to the list of your flags, see the decline reason, and learn from it--but never be afraid to flag in the first place :)}

^{2. I was planning on one to outline what can and can't be deleted, but I haven't had the time to draft it out. Feel free to do so yourself.}