2022 Moderator Election Q&A – Question Collection

Question

The purpose of this thread was to collect questions for the questionnaire. The questionnaire is now live, and you may find it here.

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Politics Stack Exchange is scheduled for an election next week, 2022-09-26. In connection with that, we will be holding a Q&A with the candidates. This will be an opportunity for members of the community to pose questions to the candidates on the topic of moderation. Participation is completely voluntary.

Here’s how it’ll work:

• Until the nomination phase, (so, until 2022-09-26 at 20:00:00Z UTC, or 4:00 pm EDT on the same day, give or take time to arrive for closure), this question will be open to collect potential questions from the users of the site. Post answers to this question containing any questions you would like to ask the candidates. Please only post one question per answer.

• If your question contains a link, please use the syntax of [text](link), as that will make it easier for transcribing for the finished questionnaire.

• This is a perfect opportunity to voice questions that are specific to your community and issues that you are running into currently.

• We, the Community Team, will be providing a small selection of generic questions. The following two questions are guaranteed to be included:

  • How would you deal with a user who produced a steady stream of valuable answers, but tends to generate a large number of arguments/flags from comments?
  • How would you handle a situation where another mod closed/deleted/etc. a question that you feel shouldn’t have been?

• The community team may also include the following three questions if the community doesn’t supply enough questions.

  • In your opinion, what do moderators do?
  • A diamond will be attached to everything you say and have said in the past, including questions, answers and comments. Everything you will do will be seen under a different light. How do you feel about that?
  • In what way do you feel that being a moderator will make you more effective as opposed to simply reaching 10k or 20k rep?

• At the start of the nomination phase, the Community Team will select up to 8 of the top voted questions submitted by the community provided in this thread, to use in addition to the aforementioned 2 guaranteed questions. We reserve some editorial control in the selection of the questions and may opt not to select a question that is tangential or irrelevant to moderation or the election. We exclude any suggested questions that are negatively scored.

  • We will post the final questionnaire on the Election page. Candidates will have the option to fill out the questionnaire, and their answers will appear beneath their intro statements.
  • This is not the only option that users have for gathering information on candidates. As a community, you are still free to, for example, hold a live chat session with your candidates to ask further questions, or perhaps clarifications from what is provided in the Q&A.

If you have any questions or feedback about this process, feel free to post as a comment here.

Answer 1

How would you deal with flags that are not raised because of quality but because a question/answer contradicts a popular narrative?

Answer 2

Because this site often attracts people who want to vent their political frustrations, the questions asked here are often designed to push political narratives.

There is a certain balance to be struck between maintaining a collegiate environment in which genuine curiosity should be allowed, while obvious sealioning should be discouraged.

Sometimes this balance must be maintained by the moderators. Do you think moderators should be involved in this? If you do, what methodology (if any), as a moderator, do you plan on using to achieve this goal?

Answer 3

What areas of moderator activity do you think require more attention/effort than currently given?

Alternatively/Additionally, if you think some aspects of P.SE are over-moderated, which are those, in your view?

Answer 4

There's always a user or two who wants to debate where questions cross the community defined good-faith standard (which now has its own close reason)

Do you think the standard is sufficient as-is or is there anything you would like to see added or removed?

From Machavity in the previous question collection

Answer 5

As a moderator your actions such as close votes will be binding and take only you for the action to complete. Will this change the way you interact on the site and what actions you take?

Answer 6

Is there any activity or behavior you have engaged in on the site that you have since come to regret? Why do you regret it and how do you look back on it now?

The question is left rather broad on purpose, I hope candidates will use it as an opportunity for self-reflection which they'll then share with the group. :)

Answer 7

I am happy with all 3 current mods. However, it might also be a good thing to rotate at least 1 to one of the new candidates.

• fresh blood

• rest, if you've been herding cats for a while ("doing this task", for those who might miss the English colloquialism).

• backup, if someone has to stop moderating for whatever reason.

I wonder, if you are an existing mod, if there is way to indicate how much you are intent on re-signing up for your own reasons. Or if it is out of sense of duty. If the latter, I might pick one of the new candidates as they are willing to step up.

Answer 8

How would you handle answers that both give facts and the writer's opinion, and cannot be edited to remove the opinion without significantly changing the author's intent?

Answer 9

Do you think members will have faith that you know what you are doing as a moderator? If they don't, how do you plan on changing that as a moderator?

Answer 10

Have you ever had your account suspended, or received a warning from the moderators, on this Stack Exchange site before?