When do we formally elect moderators? - TeX

TopAnswers TeX

Top Answer

Jack Douglas

We are not currently planning to have a single 'moderator' role on TopAnswers. We want to break that down if possible and also shed some of the mystique around moderator actions — in practice that will mean keeping things as public as possible, and even avoiding words like 'moderator', 'reputation' etc that can carry a lot of unnecessary baggage.

That is not to rule out elections. We need some way of making the community itself responsible for choosing how it is run. My current thinking is that communities will elect people with one power: the power to delegate roles (such as 'post cleanup crew') from within the community. Perhaps they could simply be called a '[delegator](https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/delegator)'?

If you agree that is a good direction, I'm happy for us to do that when you decide you are ready — bearing in mind of course that the tools and platform will be evolving underneath us as we go along!

yes, in theory, and I don't think you are saying we *should* do that — the underlying problem is that having lots of stars doesn't make you qualified to clean up comments or posts or add tags or whatever. People who show aptitude and desire to help in those areas can just be hand-picked (and you can revoke if it transpires that they are unsuitable after all)

I think it is worth trying. All models have some drawbacks. It always comes back to the question whether or not we trust those who really make the decisions and really trust them. A pure democratic election is also tricky. (I still think that a refereeing system will add some real value to the site.)

Imho, that would be too arbitrary. I'd rather have a biggish crew of people having review privileges who were elected and are generally trusted by the community instead of auto-adding people to that crew.

So translated to stackexchange language, being in one or more groups is like the privileges on SE, where one gets the ability to cast close or reopen votes? So in theory we could for example add every user above a certain experience level to the clean up crew (and revoke if unsuitable)?

I'm envisaging the crews to be large, maybe dozens of people. I haven't given much thought whether self-delegation would be possible, but in all of this it is absolutely quite possible that my idea is not good! We'll no doubt ditch many ideas along the way!

so we're voting for three people who can then dictate who is allowed to do what, instead of voting directly on the people who are allowed? Sorry if that is a major misunderstanding, but as I currently understand your idea I don't think it is good.

@Jack I'm glad that we evolve, and I have no idea when we are ready. The term used for the people who were elected doesn't matter to me. But I don't think we should vote one person to have the ability to delegate arbitrary people into the clean up crew. I think the community should vote the people who end up there.

1 Answer