“Is something wrong?” Yes: Too much moderation

Question

RPG's users and moderators have a number of problems as summarized in this question's answers. However, several mods have said that they can't accept meta feedback in the form of anything other than individually-separated questions. While I think that's unreasonable and contrary to common meta practice here and elsewhere, in the spirit of taking all possible approaches to getting us started on resolving these problems, I'm reposting my observations as a series of questions instead of a single answer. I'm hoping for answers that generally agree with the problem statement and go on to give proposals for fixing that (and may post later with my own ideas), but answers that explain why the problems observed are less severe (or more severe) or characterized differently than stated would also fit well.

This post is about…

Moderators being community leaders instead of exception handlers

The moderators on this site are very present and lead efforts to change the site (for example changing rules and tag meanings). I don't doubt that they do this in what they think is the site's best interest. But it feels very heavy handed and not like the very laid back moderation of other sites.

Lets look at SE policies and how they explain what the moderators should do:

• Who are the diamond moderators, and what is their role?

• Who are the site moderators, and what is their role here?

• A theory of moderation

OK, that's a lot to read and I'd like to quote those parts I think are a very general, but also very expressive guideline to moderator duties:

But what do community moderators do? The short answer is, as little as possible!

[...]

Even with active community self-regulation, moderators occasionally need to intervene. Moderators are human exception handlers, there to deal with those (hopefully rare) exceptional conditions that should not normally happen, but when they do, they can bring your entire community to a screaming halt -- if you don't have human exception handling in place.

Please note that while I absolutely agree with the accentuation, they are not mine but taken from the original posting.

When we have a look at comparable sites (for example The Workplace was of equal size, we are now having more questions then them), then there are about an equal number of clearly off-topic questions. Right now, the front page over there has more [On hold] questions than open ones. But not a single one was closed by a moderator. They all were closed by a 5-people-consensus. While it certainly isn't wrong for a moderator to close a question when he sees it's off-topic, the fact that our moderators are quite quick to do it gives this site a quite heavy, moderated feel. Being closed by a diamond mod has a very different feel to being closed due to 5 normal community members agreeing.

Taking a recent example that lead to this whole number of posts:

Aggressively police answers

Source of Quote

This is not something I'd like a mod to do under any circumstance. The moderators are supposed to be the exception handlers. Handle exceptions. Answers are to be policed by the community. The moderators are certainly part of this community, but using the mod powers is not.

We should do this thing. All three diamond mods support it.

Source of Quote

That's not a reason to do anything about the site. The moderators are just three people. Of many. The answer is certainly not wrong, but it transports an attitude that I do not like in moderators of an SE network site.

the mod interpretation of current state is as I've stated it above. Therefore it is fact, as we're the ones that have to enforce it

Source of Quote

This shows both points quite well: the message that is sent by the mods is that the moderators police this site by enforcing rules. But it's not a mods job to use moderator powers to police this site, it's the communities job. If game-rec questions are to be banned, then the community will close them by voting. In addition, it also shows the kind of "my way or the highway" attitude that gets transported in this message. The mods have spoken, therefore the issue is settled. I'm not saying the moderators are doing this in bad faith or an attempt to become absolutist monarchs, but the message the moderators are sending both written and as a general feeling is just that. It comes across more as a ruler than a referee.

So, yes, I cannot point a finger to a single action and say "see, that's wrong". Because it's not a single action. Every single action for itself might be fine. It's the sum of actions and it's the attitude that gets transported. The message the moderators send with those actions is that of a very heavy handed and direct moderation. Other sites manage way better to have their moderators solve the real problems (voting fraud, sock-puppets, harassment, SPAM) behind the scenes and not having their diamonds show up in everyday community business.

Answer 1

What to do?

From my perspective, the moderators should do less. A lot less. The site is fine. It attracts a reasonable amount of quality questions and answers. The next time someone posts an off-topic question and a moderators sees it? Let it slip. Wait 8 hours. By then, the community might have already policed it. And if not, the moderators still can. The next time the moderators see a tag being treated in a way they don't like? Ask an open-ended question. And accept the fact that maybe "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" is an acceptable answer.

Wielding mod powers always has an air of dictatorship. For example casting a single binding vote using the mod's powers, while other users need a 5 votes consent seems absolutist. Especially to the one whose question got closed. It's unfortunate that mods cannot "unmod" and use only regular user powers. In this light, it would appear a lot less direct and heavy to use the mods powers sparingly and only when the community did not react.

If a moderator wants to lead, do so by being a role-model (you all write great answers, I'm sure that should not be hard), without taking moderator-style actions. Moderator actions are for exceptional circumstances.

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(And on a personal note, maybe if you read my meta posts in the light of not asking for actions, but asking for an agreement on how to be a role-model, they might make a lot more sense. The first answer I always got was "we cannot do this within the rules". I wasn't asking for actions or enforceable rules, I was asking on a consensus on how to behave if you want to be a role-model. That's a big difference.)

Answer 2

I'm going to play the other side of much recent meta-action for a moment:

We tapped three of our most-active users to moderate. So all of their actions now carry a diamond.

I don't think we want to still their voices--either procedurally or just through pressure--just because they're now diamond-certified. The same actions they'd always taken now carry a diamond and often carry more weight. As mxyzplk correctly points out, that's a stack-wide policy with desired effects: they don't get to be just "regular users" anymore.

Moderators qua moderators do as little as possible.

The Meta posts linked above seem, to me, at odds with the reality of Stack moderation: those from among the most active users (usually) are tagged with a diamond and told to "do as little as possible"? I can only harmonize this by reading the Theory of Moderation to be addressing moderators' moderator actions, as distinct from their user actions.

Moderators qua users are leaders. They were before being tapped, and shouldn't stop.

The same behaviors which earned these mods our votes now have diamonds attached to them (both prospectively and retroactively) and stand as an example to all comers of what this community believes represents its best behavior. Obviously, not every action, comment, and answer lives up to that standard. But their everyday actions should stand as example to new users of how to run the site well.

What should the moderators do to counteract the "heavy-handed" feeling?

I imagine that the job of a moderator is a lot like that of watching over the plaground at recess. Let's watch everyone having fun, break up any shoving matches, keep an eye on the fences, step in and enforce some rules when things get rowdy. (I do not mean to trivialize the job of the moderator, nor the feelings of any involved who have had unpleasant experiences. I'm simply hoping to step back a moment from the current, real issues and take a big-picture look at what's going on. I also don't mean to trivialize the job of a playground supervisor.)

One of the difficult things about the job of playground monitor is that no matter how many times you tell the kids to stop shoving, they never do. That's because it's always new kids, year after year. No matter how many times you explain the rules, someone's always ignorant. No matter how many times you explain why you can't climb the basketball hoop, there's some yahoo climbing the basketball hoop.

So, too, do moderators find themselves having to explain themselves over and over again. It's a part of the job they may not have appreciated at first, and I've got to imagine it tries one's patience. But they've got to stay patient, write (auto-write?) friendly and welcoming corrective comments, explain themselves ad infinitum on Meta, and all without betraying an iota of impatience.

It's a tall order, and I've seen them fall short sometimes. So when they do, let's gently correct them with a little patience, sympathy, and good-faith-assumption thrown in on our own part.

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Revisited, with a blue name:

I (one month in) still stand by what I said here, in my tenth post on meta just a few months into user-hood. But I do want to reiterate, from my mod POV:

I will not always get it right. I may not know as much as you. I can use (gentle) correcting at times, too. I assume good faith, especially from those who disagree with me.

Please go ahead and address me specifically when you think I've made a mistake. Someone's going to learn something, and that makes me happy.

Answer 3

Overall SE Norms

So here's the deal - I think that this impression is caused by a mix of not really having visibility into what actually caused a given instance of moderator intervention (frequently it's flag driven, but there's no way for you to see that) and also a misunderstanding of what the limits of mod exception-handling should be.

Let me offer up a little anecdote. I thought that e.g. the idea of a moderator being able to cast a non-binding close vote was a good one, since it would let us not "unilaterally close" but still participate, and I went and duly championed it on meta.stackoverflow in this question.

The general response from the SO supermod community was very against this. Here's Jeff Atwood's answer:

The purpose of moderators is to moderate.

If they are afraid to do so, they should not be moderators in the first place.

As for educating the community, leaving instructive, explanatory comments is far more useful than casting a weak regular user vote in these circumstances.

So in summary: leave extensive comments, and learn to wield the big vote stick responsibly.

I specifically objected to this answer and was told:

@mxy if you want to educate, leave comments explaining your actions. Good moderators should be doing this anyway. Pretending to hide in the cloak of "oh, I'm just a regular user like you good folks" is an abdication of responsibility as a moderator.

See also Shog9's comments on the various answers on that question to the same effect.

I definitely hear how some of you have an expectation that we as mods shouldn't take action on e.g. closes until the community has exhausted itself. The problem is, this is NOT the guidance we get from the larger SO mod community. Their guidance is often very much "you're a diamond mod, do the right thing, screw the whiners." Here's another example thereof. I've taken a variety of community concerns from here to Meta.SE and generally get shot down with the reasoning "people need to have a thicker skin about life," ironically usually over my objections.

So you might see how we are sometimes a little ambivalent about how to proceed. We get that some folks here who want us to "do less," take a step back, etc., but we get feedback from the "higher-ups" that is "abdication of responsibility." It's a hard balance to strike. I think that we end up being a lot more lenient and less harsh that the advice we're given recommends. But we do have a responsibility to the entire site to uphold, and I guarantee no one here knows more about building online communities that Jeff Atwood. SSD has talked about how his perspective changed a lot once he couldn't just spout about his thoughts but was actually responsible for the site - it changes how you handle things, and it needs to. So yes, sometimes we have to do things that make some people unhappy. But that's part of the job.

The RPG.SE Community

Obviously strictness varies amongst the "new SEs". Some of this is because of the kind of community that SE serves.

You have some that are much more strict because people just can't handle the format. Christianity.SE comes to mind - they basically ended up having to say "if it's not a written down doctrine of a specific denomination, don't talk about it". It's as if we said on RPG.SE "look - we're going to do RAW and only RAW because no one can keep it together once there's any opinion involved." Then you have other SEs that are much more lax, and their quality suffers. I'll be honest, I don't use some of the other new hobby SEs because their signal to noise approaches that of a forum.

I further think we can all acknowledge that the RPG/geek community is more argumentative and opinionated than some other communities that SE serves. Less so than those drawn to something like a religious SE, but a lot more than many. This does pose a challenge, especially while RPG.SE was growing (not enough high rep site users means hard to close, delete, etc, when needed), and also users can't delete comments - and running off at the mouth in comments is a beloved part of the RPG community's habits from forums et al. It results in needing slightly more stringent rules and enforcement thereof - hopefully not to the Christianity.SE degree, but I am sure, for example, that we have a stricter comment policy than some SEs mainly because we need it more.

While our current stance isn't perfect and we've made some mistakes over the years, I think that if you review RPG.SE alongside the other SEs, we are one of the absolute best run SEs in the entire portfolio. New people show up, they ask questions, they get them answered, long term community members grow in rep - I think the results here on RPG.SE speak for themselves. In a previous question someone made a comment about the "lower quality" content on RPG.SE and I think that's completely and patently untrue, and even a basic canvas of our front page vs the front page of most other SEs indicates a much greater number of well-reasoned, coherent questions and answers, accepted answers, etc. - all the measures of "is this site doing what it's supposed to do, which is provide the Internet with quality answers to its questions."

And this isn't a result of "draconian" moderation. We've never banned someone from RPG.SE IIRC (well, except for the 0-rep spam accounts that show up). We've handed out a small handful of short suspensions over the entire span of site operation. (Any of you that participate on any RPG forum can appreciate how different that is from what's required to keep order on the average RPG community- heck, even some of you are banned from rpg.net, ENworld, etc.) The vast majority of site operation is handled by the community and the mods chip in to a small degree. Heck, I have a job and a kid - I spend maybe 10 minutes on flags/alerts/etc in the AM before work and then 15m-1h in the evening to vote, write answers/questions/comments, close things, delete comments, etc. all told. We really don't do that much. Reviewing mod stats, looks like the entire mod team closes about one question a day on average total - and that's from all causes, including spam, flag response, etc. A lot of questions, answers, comments, etc. flow through here on any given day, we don't see them all let alone act on many. I don't even go into the review queues any more, when I bother to the stuff in there disappears as I watch as the community handles it - problem solved, believe it or not I'd rather spend less time moderating this site, not more. We mods talk with each other before taking any major action, we let community close votes pile up before acting ourselves on closes that aren't clearly for cause, etc. You have to realize that the restraint is invisible to you, because you only see the actions.

The SE format itself is more restrictive than many on the Internet, and as a custom sub-culture we have many years of guidance on meta etc. Especially new users (though in the game-rec case, we learned that "new" can mean years) don't have all that context and tend to complain when they bump into the walls, and it's easy to say it's "the mods" (since that's the case on most other sites) when really it's the way the entire community works. We can comment and help people through that, but we have to realize that's also inevitable to some degree. Be careful about using "the mods" as shorthand for any way the site works - it's often not the case.

Communication Issues and How You Can Help

We try to communicate. Frankly, I feel like it backfires on us more than half the time. I remember back years ago when aramis was taking me to task for being "the mod deleting comments" - I checked our mod stats, and I wasn't in the lead, Pat was deleting the same amount (today, SSD and I are basically tied in mod intervention stats too). However, I was more scrupulous about doing what people said they wanted us to do - leaving comments about "comments have been deleted and here's why," etc. But since me leaving that communication made my intervention more visible, he just replied "well I only see YOU doing it!." He refused to even believe that I was telling the truth that I wasn't the one doing all the deleting - and the difference was that I was bothering to communicate about it. That made a deep impression on me.

We mods (and high rep users) alter tags and edit tag wikis make synonyms and stuff all the time, without asking anyone (except in some cases an edit queue). But here recently (leading to the current kerfluffle) I said "here, let me post to meta about the RAW tag because I think there's an issue." The outflow of hate and yelling about how "we dare" to do so as a result was pretty daunting. We don't always communicate perfectly, but neither does anyone. This kind of feedback makes us draw back from communicating and incentivizes acting unilaterally "under the covers" instead.

I assume you all want us to be able to communicate openly with you. People are asking for that here in this question. Sure - but please honor that by not making it easier for us to not communicate. You can help that by tempering discussion and trying to stay rational about the issues at hand. Don't expect "perfect" communication, and we won't either. Interpret things generously and assume good intent. If someone's openly insulting that's one thing, if you are put off by their "aggressive use of quotation marks" you probably need to switch filters that you're using to read their words with. When there is a mistake, don't assume it's part of some evil-Illuminati agenda, and work towards improving next time, not "assigning blame" (I'd recommend some of you read this work on blameless postmortems to that end). Again, we'll do the same.

Sidebar - Mod collaboration as an example of different communication needs

As part of this discussion, we have had some folks recommend that a way to regain trust is for the mods to not discuss amongst themselves and come to a common stance on questions/issues before engaging with the community. We talked to the Puzzling mods who tried that on for size. So we've been trying that in this discussion, we haven't been talking much between us during these metas.

As you can see, this has led to multiple people, in this very question, demanding we "get our story straight" and are otherwise upset at me, SSD, and waxy for having and expressing different attitudes and approaches.

The thing is, both are right, in that they want different things out of communication. Some folks, generally high rep users, who want to really be part of the "action" want us to engage without common agreement. Others, and IMO this includes the 90% of site users who don't engage in meta etc., just want a consistent message. Different forms of communication are more useful to different people. Given limited time and channels, we as mods have to make a lot of judgement calls about how we communicate, and it's not always going to be the same way (it can't be), we'll choose based on our anticipation of the level of discussion needed. Please also keep this in mind. If the kind of communication in a given instance isn't "best for you" - maybe it's best for the balance of the site.

Communication to/about Mods

In the perfect world people could be grotesquely nonconstructive at us but quote "mods are supposed to be better!" at us and we'd just merrily take it. This isn't that world. We take way more abuse every week on this SE than any of you would take without (rightfully) generating hysterical pleas to meta and the community leads. Frankly I think that we've been too lenient about enforcing Be Nice! in chat especially when mods are the topic, since we don't want to be "those censoring guys," but this looks like it's had the opposite of the intended effect. So keep in mind that if you would reasonably expect to get your content deleted or get disciplined for saying something about another site user, it applies if you're talking to/about mods as well. You can talk about the issues and "use your words" without needing that. We're human, so at the very least we're going to disengage. Tuggy wrote a whole other meta about the evils of "writing off" people, but if people are hostile and declare their utter resistance to change and/or open communication - well, no one pays us, and we really have better things to do than expend effort on cases where it's unlikely to make a difference. Our job is not to be customer service agents running after everyone who's unsatisfied trying to satisfy them despite themselves, and we're not going to do that. We'd love to have polite and reasoned discussion, but for those not up for that, we're not really interested.

Other Ways To Help

Help moderate the site! You have the power. Vote to close, don't not do it because it might be "mean." Flag comments when they're not appropriate. Vote to delete. Improve tag wikis. Aside from comment deletion, power-closes, and really back end stuff like user warnings/suspensions, you can all do as much with the site as we can. Meta questions, even, don't need us every time - the community can discuss and conclude as much as anyone. In fact, you too can go chip in on meta.SE on network-wide functionality/policy suggestions, that's not just for moderators or anything.

Now of course keep in mind that us acting on a flag still "looks like" us acting unilaterally because that's not shown anywhere on the site. But you'll know you're contributing to it! And you'll know your fellow site members are too. (If you don't, then you tend to assume other people aren't.) And in the end, the right thing getting done is the right thing for the site, whoever initiates the action.

Run for mod! We just elected 2 new ones you know. And the fact that the brand new mods are generally upholding how the mods act should carry some weight with y'all - we've been through 3 mod regimes so far on the site, and moderation has pretty much been consistent through them - because mostly, the right things are getting done (IMO). Again, the other option is "Illuminati?" There's folks in this argument who I personally urged to run for mod last election. No harm that they couldn't/didn't, but again, this isn't some closed clique.

The Conclusion

While we're open to discussion about how much intervention is required in certain things, none of the suggestions about "mods shouldn't close questions till X time has passed" or "mods should stay away from certain tags" or anything of that sort is going to happen. In the end we have a responsibility to the site, a responsibility that people up to Jeff Atwood clearly explain to us. We will continue to be the human exception handlers on the site in generally the same categories we do now (flag handling, closes, comment deletes, commenting to try to guide people, much-less-frequent everything else). We have to balance our community's perceived unique needs with the overall SE structure and best practices (it's not either-or).

The primary issue we have at the moment is trust, and that is largely based on a combination of communication problems and really attitude-about-communication problems. Really it's more the latter than the former IMO (on everyone's part - when everything gets heated up I and the other mods also start reacting back by reading people's words badly because we feel under attack all the time). The solution to that can start today by everyone cooling off and discussing issues and assuming good faith on everyone's part. Repeating that over time is really the only solution to the only major problem we have. The more everyone here participates in moderating the site and upholding the site norms - clear questions, quality answers, few comments, be nice, etc - the more this site becomes "your" site and not "their" site.

Answer 4

Policing questions before a community gets to see them, discouraging questions in comments by deleting them and jumping in before the automatic chat function kicks in.

So my gripe is when a mod decides to police a question being asked before the community even gets on top of it. I posted a question very recently that already had two upvotes before the question itself was modified to only ask about a very specific functionality of the item instead of the actual function of the item as a whole.

Then the RAW tag was removed despite my objective in seeking a RAW answer.

Now, this mod did leave an initial comment on the thread, to which I responded that I was looking for Rules as Written answers, and to which he responded that those were subjective so he was removing the RAW tag. Great. Everything in life is subjective as a technicality. I'm looking for supported, factual answers citing source material that definitively states things. I made this very, very clear.

So coming to Meta I've made some comments in the initial post about how moderators are too quick to jump on questions or insanely quick to police comments. Look, we know comments aren't for extended discussion. But when the discussion is on topic, especially for D&D, we're discussing specific nuances and potential miscommunications in the language itself. These are NECESSARY discussions. Every D&D group has gone through them, which means if somebody is asking something in the comments, they're pointing out that the question is going to come up so the answer needs to be improved in order to address that potential question.

If you'd like, people could start prefacing everything with: This is intended to help you reword your answer in such a way that will address this following question which may occur.

I personally see that as completely pointless and a waste of characters in discussion. Some mods have pointed out that they've "received invisible flags" to the community about flagged comments. Great. That works when the comments have been sitting there for a couple of days or a week. When you're jumping on people within the first couple of hours a comment is posted, especially in an ongoing discussion that's still happening, you're not handling exceptions. The system automatically offers to move you to chat for those, and we normally utilize it if the conversation gets that far in the first place.

Let the site tools do their job. If the automatic chat bubble appears too far down for your liking, set it to happen after 6 comments instead of 10 or something. I don't know the settings behind it specifically, but unless you can't modify it, there's no reason to be jumping in before it pops to tell people to move discussions to chat. You also need to consider that people may not have permission or the knowledge on how to set up a chat room, and it's something worth considering.

TL;DR version: Let the community decide if a question is good or bad before jumping in and editing it without permission from the author. Formatting a question is fine, since it doesn't change content. But the question/answer isn't yours, so don't touch it. Comment discussions are not always bad, and treating them as such is prohibitive to getting good answers.

Moderator names and links to relevant posts were left out intentionally. I don't want to point fingers, I want to address the actual problem. The moderators here are patient, helpful and knowledgeable, but this complaint is about too much hands on vs not enough.

Answer 5

tl;dr*

When I talk about waiting I simply mean, give the community some time to see if the obviously broken answer is not actually broken at all.

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The Preface

I never intended to post here:

I am fairly certain that I voted for the current mods whenever the previous election was. If someone has access to the real data I don't care because quite frankly:

I nearly always smile when I see @SevenSidedDie's avatar, which is bizarre given that he/she/it is just some stranger on an SE sub I mainly lurk in now; and I find that though I may disagree I always read @waxeagle's posts; and though I'd currently describe @mxyzplk as grumpy, and maybe even heavy handed, the claim that he/she/it is out to get RAW is nothing short of paranoid, as far as I can tell. Whoever that was, if you still feel that way after (re)reading these meta threads, and a stout drink/good night's sleep/or simply a deep breath, please get some help.

One final thing, I think all the examples here are my own questions, they should be taken as examples and no additional complaint should be read into them beyond the concern they (hopefully) illustrate.

The Body

On waiting:

I definitely hear how some of you have an expectation that we as mods shouldn't take action on e.g. closes until the community has exhausted itself.

No, but I do expect that a moderator should give the community some time before taking action, and maybe not take action at all.

As an example, a mod commented on my answer here, indicating that the concern was the down votes that may result as it did not seem to answer the request. Given the comments, it seems fair to say that this was a case where the mod felt that NAA might apply, but here we are 4 years out and that post has +8/-0.

On appeals to authority:

The problem is, this is NOT the guidance we get from the larger SO mod community. Their guidance is often very much "you're a diamond mod, do the right thing, screw the whiners."

A sample to the contrary from "the larger SO mod community":

My answer here is clearly viewed by a portion of the community as not even being an answer to the question, but oddly enough it hangs on even post moderator attention. There was no whining on my part. It even hurts my reputation (as I understand it) to leave it up there, but it stands (I believe) because it was an honest attempt to answer the question as asked.

I also point back to @nvoigt's comment that pointed to Can we have an unambiguous, official ruling on what the "not an answer" flag is for?

Though sadly @waxeagle responded:

@nvoigt if that actually worked, I'd be OK with that. But it really doesn't in practice.

Sorry, you guys need to get your story straight, either you're only "taking orders from on high", in which case we get to quote the same scriptures, or what is said "on high" "really doesn't [work] in practice" in which case you can make no appeal to authority.

On why RPG.se is a unique snowflake:

Christianity.SE comes to mind - they basically ended up having to say "if it's not a written down doctrine of a specific denomination, don't talk about it".

Nope. If that was the case we'd never have had How can the logical impossibility of infinite self reference be reconciled in the case of God?. (Spending time discussing Computer Science on Christianity.se, what was I thinking?)

I further think we can all acknowledge that the RPG/geek community is more argumentative and opinionated than some other communities that SE serves. ... but I am sure, for example, that we have a stricter comment policy than some SEs mainly because we need it more.

But, you just said that you are simply following advice from SO in general? Why would you do that if RPG.SE is so unique?

I know, I am certainly inconsistent in my own thoughts, and you mentioned how tight the balancing act is. I'm really only here to present to you a different view of why we are unique, and one that might point to "less" moderator action.

We are unique. We are not SO. We are not trying to round out our resumes, or improve responsive design, or ensure that the next patriot missile system has the correct calendar algorithm. We are not dealing with wrestling with someone's view of GOD, patents, or worse yet people asking us for the codez! We are helping people spend their leisure time playing pretend.

Therefore we should be MORE relaxed than any of the others... though maybe not those si-fi people.

On Why this answer doesn't matter:

Finally, I realize that none of what I've posted is a statistical drop in the bucket, but there are real people out here debating if they should bother spending time here and when anyone appears to be running around with a hammer hitting anything that even looks like it might be thinking about going off script... well I've already invested way too much time into this.

The Conclusion

tl;dr**

If SO itself can award 230 rep for the wrong answer, maybe the mods and the rest of us can wait a day longer and see if the post that clearly does not answer the question asking for canonical sources, can become the top rated answer, or even if the question that should have never been asked can maybe teach us all a bit about being better players.

*Should be tl;wr for won't, but convention wins out.

**Actual tl;dr.

Answer 6

I'll probably post another more general answer here. But I really want to address something very specific for the moment. The line that seems to have struck a nerve in my RAW data collection post:

Aggressively Police Answers

All that was meant by that statement was that I was (and still am) in favor of deleting answers that do not attempt to answer the question. We even have a whole flag just for these answers (Not an Answer). That's all that was meant by that statement.

Normally, this is pretty cut and dried, you answer a 4e question with a 3.5 or 5e answer, that's not an answer, delete. You answer a FATE question with GURPs, not an answer, delete. All that statement was attempting to do was apply the same exact logic to RAW questions. You answer a RAW question with a house rule, not an answer, delete. This isn't a change, just a commitment to paying more attention to those questions during the period.

That phrase wasn't talking about hyper interventionist moderation it's simply about moderators doing their jobs.

Answer 7

I'm new here, having spotted an RPG question recently while surfing StackOverflow. One of the first things I noticed about the site is that so many of the questions get edited by folks who didn't post them (in general, and specifically compared to StackOverflow).

As a sanity check, I just went in and compared the edits made to 15 questions on Stack RGP and Stack Overflow.

At StackOverflow, 2 out of 15 questions edited: on one duplicate content was removed, and the other, and obvious typo was fixed. (In the past, I know I've also seen broken English corrected as well, and the removal of punctuation such as "superfluous quoatation marks.")

At Stack RPG, 6 out of 15 questions were edited:

• One question was heavily edited to remove some sensitive languge. That is understandable.

• On several, tags were added or removed (sometimes questionably so).

• Content was moved around and reworked.
• Whole paragraphs were added to questions.
• Grammatical errors were introduced into other people's writing (by accident, I am sure, but that happens when you edit too much)

At StackOverflow, I also see explanations (and apologies) in the comments when people get their posts edited. I don't see that here.

So yes, I think there is merit to the "too much moderation" complaint. I think the guidance from the wider SE moderator community might be getting taken too much at face value.

That's just an observation, not a complaint. This place seems like a pretty nice neighborhood.

Answer 8

I'm seeing two major problems presented here, the first seems to be with moderators bringing up issues on meta. The second is with them proposing solutions to those problems on meta. I'm only going to address the first in this post as my opinions on that are solidified and coalesced properly. My opinions are the second are more nuanced, though a basic outline of them are written in the final question of the nomination Q&A.

We're garbagemen. But if the garbage can is on fire, we're going to do something about the fire too.

There's a reason that often it's the moderators bringing problems before the community: because we're seeing first hand the fallout from these problems.

So if we're consistently seeing the same types of questions raising flags, causing arguments, raising hackles in chat and on meta etc, we're going to say something about it, because that's part of being exception handlers. Raising exceptions when the community isn't noticing (or can't notice) the patterns.

By electing us as moderators, you aren't just trusting us to handle flags and delete garbage, but you're also entrusting us with identifying patterns of problematic behavior that may not be immediately apparent. This can be problems with users, or problems with site content.

Please understand that moderators are not bringing issues up on meta because it suits their digestion. We're doing it because we're noticing patterns of problematic behavior (flags, arguments, edit/vote warring etc) that have been brought to our attention numerous times by site users or even sometimes automated system flags.

In other words, it is our role as exception handlers to raise exceptions when we are noticing problems that are escaping the community's notice.

Lastly, there seems to be an indication that we should wait to use our powers. I disagree with this too, at least in the case of question closure. Again, here's what I wrote in my nomination post:

This may seem odd, but I strongly believe that one of the best gifts we can give to a new user is a rapid close with a strong comment about what can be fixed followed by a rapid reopening. Yes, we can scare new users off with our friendliness and adherence to site policy at times, however, we can also get a user who is just off track right on very quickly if we can get to them early, get their question closed, edited and reopened in a few short minutes. It's important in these situations to communicate both site policy and how to repair a question quickly and concisely and to pair that with decisive action (Both on the close side and the reopen side)

That's my personal theory on question closure. Do it fast so the user knows something is wrong, get them on the right track, and then get it reopened. This is because our users are really good at answering quickly sometimes, and it's a lot harder to get rid of a bad answer than it is to get the question work shopped so that the answers, when they do come in, are good and help the user as best as they can.

I'd much rather our users were closing these questions, deleting answers that need it, and raising issues with problematic tags on meta. But in reality, this kind of participation is pretty rare. We do have a pretty good set of users who do those things, but that process does break down and that's when moderators step in. If it seems like we're doing it a lot it might be because that system is breaking down more than normal.

Answer 9

In the light of some of the moderators comments, I'd like to add an alternative to my first answer:

Educate the community

Lets take the RAW and policing discussion as a prime example. What should ideally be done is that the community should down vote the answers that don't adhere to the RAW tags requirements. What you propose, because you think the community will not be able to handle it, is to flag it and moderate it.

There is a quite old, but very respected FAQ about Hacker communities, which at least SO is a part of: How To Ask Questions The Smart Way. It's way older than any SE and older than the SO idea or implementation.

Community standards do not maintain themselves: They're maintained by people actively applying them, visibly, in public.

So yes, I think this is correct. For a community to learn and apply standards, those standards must be applied by their role-models. Visibly. In public. If you flag NAA and subsequently delete a post that is not up to our standards, nobody learns anything from it. The community at large is no smarter than before.

It's like dragging the offender into a dark back-alley and spanking him. That may be effective for the offender, but if nobody knows about it, you will need to repeat it for every. single. offender.

And most won't even know what hit them. Because they never witnessed an account of wrongdoing and therefore did not even have a chance to see that what they did was wrong before a moderator action struck them.

Lets stay with the example. To set up and maintain a community standard, that RAW answer talking about house rules needs to sit at -10. With a comment nine times up-voted saying "this is a house-rule and we are looking for written rules only as per the tag". For everyone to see that this behavior is wrong. Visible. In public. Because now everyone can see that we don't want house-rules in the RAW tag. Now the community can learn, even without reading through tons of meta posts. New people will see what is expected from them and won't make the same mistake all over again.

Use your mod powers less, because using them in that way makes the site look pretty on the outside, but breeds a community that has no guideline on what is right or wrong. Flagging and mod powers that are invisible to the public add to the mistrust because they seemingly strike out of nowhere without any prior warning. The community should use their downvotes to police this site. Using mod powers for it is counterproductive.

If you don't trust the community to do this, have a chat and down-vote those you'd flag and close/remove as a team. A -3 and three comments why this is wrong is a pretty clear signal the community will see and understand. More importantly, it is a signal. Flagging and removing signals nothing. Literally. Any trace of what might be wrong is gone without any learning opportunity.

tl;dr:

Mistakes are a learning opportunity if available. Removing errors behind the scenes teaches the community nothing. And we do need a well educated community to run an SE site. So police the site, but do so visibly in public with the means available to the public. That means down-votes and comments mostly.

Answer 10

Fundamentally, I don't think the mods here believe in the stackexchange model of leaving most "moderation" to the posters via voting. They are very quick to edit or make meta-comments. I envy them their spare time.

Answer 11

When the Mods can't even leave a conversation about too much moderation alone in meta, there is too much moderation. We've had mods go bad on another site and have to have them removed. The mod removed was doing what he thought best for the site, there was no intentional malice but he was trying to clean up the site, by his interpretation, not the community. At first I thought I was seeing another one of those situations in slow motion. however, I think the problem boils down to choosing very active members for mods. It's tough (frabkly it'd be impossible for me I think) to separate the mod actions from active members of the community. Partly there is a perception problem and partly there is the moderation finality problem. I also think there is a "do something " mentality as well that is completely at odds with the "do little" theory of moderation. Case in point it what finally lead me to stick in an answer. In this question you'll notice that much of the discussion (the entire point of meta BTW to post and discuss issues as a community) was moved to chat.

Seriously??

Now I have nothing against any of the mods but that comes across as a real jerk (to keep it PG), spiteful move. It smacks of being done to ensure no one can see the dissenting opinions. The absolutely last place a moderator should be screwing around with comments is in a discussion about how the mods do too much.

Edit: on the usefulness of chat for a meta discussion - from chat "@SevenSidedDie The comment got moved to chat, so it is not handy at the moment"