Do we want three moderators, or four?

Question

When we asked Stack Staff for an election to fill wax eagle's spot, we were thinking just in terms of bringing our active moderators back up to three. We didn't think about it much farther than that.

The idea of electing more than one more mod came up in comments, and Grace Note (who's the CM taking point on our election) asked us as well if we'd thought about more than one slot for this election.

We just hadn't thought about it much. So I wanted to get the temperature of the community on this: do we want three mods or four?

This is a step in information gathering rather than an Official Vote Thing, so just speak and muse freely. We want to know what you think and why so we can proceed while well-informed.

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In terms of what more mods are good for, it's mostly about handling workload. Paraphrasing Grace Note, “workload” in this sense includes not just flag handling (though that's important), but also includes things like

• the amount of work to be done on meta
• depth of communication, with the community and outside it
• better coverage of timezones

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We've settled on four.

Thanks for all the input! See this answer for the broad strokes reasoning.

Answer 1

Four could be helpful for the situation mentioned in this comment:

Yep, mxyzplk and I are often on the same wavelength (enough that the times we aren't can stand out), but we're also keenly aware that a mental monoculture in the mod team is undesirable for the site. I'm personally looking forward to the stable instability that is magic number 3. – SevenSidedDie♦

Simplifying things, we could take this as meaning that you and mxyzplk mostly share the same perspective on stuff, and this manifests to the diamond moderator team's disadvantage. If it's virtuous to have three distinct perspectives available on the moderator team, four moderators are likely to give us that.

Timezone coverage would also be a benefit.

Naturally neither of these things are guaranteed to shake out that way: we could wind up electing 2 more US-based moderators who add to the monoculture. (That's probably unlikely though, just due to the diversity of our established user base.)

We don't have a need for a fourth moderator though; I'd be okay with three or four.

Answer 2

I think it's obvious that we need more.

More than two, that is. It's obvious, because you two (@mxyzplk and @SevenSidedDie) say so. There might be other possible signs that a third was needed, I don't know. Your say-so is sufficient, by my thinking.

It's not obvious that we need four.

I think that having another perspective in the conversation will be good.

I think that having another citizen learn the moderation ropes will be good. (I believe strongly in an organization rotating through key positions not only to bring new ideas to that position, but to push those experiences to the broader community.)

I don't know how to judge whether one new mod is "enough" or whether two will be "necessary" on the above fronts. I think more might be better, but am wary that 50% new might also be oversaturating existing mods' responsibility to both continue moderating and teach new mods the ropes. [@greener's answer, though, brings up a good point: if 3 distinct perspectives is the goal, four may, in fact, be necessary to achieve that.]

I think I'd be happy with one new mod now if it were clear how we could request a fourth if it seemed necessary/useful.

It seems obvious that if you asked @GraceNote to run an election, say, six months from now for #4 that would happen.

What would need to happen if I and a dozen other "regular" users thought a fourth was needed?

Answer 3

I'm in agreement with the ideas floated thus far--it doesn't sound like we're sure there's a need for four modsworth of effort, but given the current team makeup we might need four mods if we want to be sure of three diverse perspectives at the elected table.

This leads me to a concern.

It's been clearly established, I think, that elected mods doing too much of the work the community can do causes toxic effects on the site. I'm worried that too many moderators with too little to do might lead to that situation happening again. Perhaps I'm being uncharitable, though; sufficient self-control on the part of the mods would obviously nip that in the bud... but it might also be kinda cruel to elect people knowing we're asking them to sit on their hands. So, in the spirit of GS/BS I think it's important to ask:

Does the Stack network have any experiential learning about what happens if a site elects moderators in excess of its practical needs for moderator action?

Answer 4

There's a lot of talk about "perspectives" and "diversity" regarding moderator composition, and I'd like to share my thoughts on the subject because it recently (about five minutes ago) became clear to me that people may be meaning VERY different things when we talk about these ideas. Here's where I'm coming from:

When I think about what's valuable in "a diversity of perspectives," I don't think about agendas or policy opinions. Instead, I think about how a diversity of experience can help with constructive dialogue by broadening our ability to see where somebody else is coming from and understand a tangential perspective.

Historically some of our biggest dust-ups have boiled down to communication breakdowns like confusion about historical context (tool-rec) or what jargon implies (RAW). This very answer is in response to my recognising that I was probably misunderstanding how others were using terms!

Both Mxy and d7 have taken visible pains to improve the clarity of the site's communication (see above "this is a step in information gathering rather than an Official Vote Thing"), and I don't mean to diminish their ongoing successes in any way when I say:

If a third mod brings a significantly different set of communication skills and play experiences from either d7 or Mxy I think that'd be a great boon to the entire community's culture of constructive dialogue. And if it's a communication monoculture that d7 meant by this comment, then I can see the value in a fourth mod from that perspective--though on its own I don't see that contribution being sufficient to justify opening an entire fourth mod slot.

Answer 5

We've asked Grace Note to give us two election slots, for a total of four mods.

After this consultation with the community we heard ideas for and against 3 and 4, but the overall sense we got from you all collectively was “eh, either is fine and maybe four would be useful, but we don't see a clear and present need for more than three.” It's good to know that the community is comfy with either possibility, even if it didn't help make up our minds.

What decided us was that we like three active mods, and having four means that each of us can more easily take short breaks to recharge the batteries. The last few mod resignations were from major burnout, and the chance to drop out for a little sabbatical and still know the site is still being minded by three active mods should make a big dent in the mod attrition rate. (I just now noticed that Baskakov_Dimitriy suggested this very reason in a comment last week.)

And we have such a wide and interesting field of candidates, now is a great opportunity to expand the mod team just a bit.

So we've asked Grace Note for two slots in this election. The election page hasn't been updated yet though (the “moderator positions available” number in the sidebar), since Grace seems to be a bit busy. Rather than wait for the button to be pushed officially though, we wanted to let you know sooner rather than later.
The election page has been officially updated to show 2 positions up for election.

I don't expect that this will change the progress of the election much, since it seems to be roaring along quite well regardless already.

Answer 6

I know it feels like a pretty odd criteria but - least for us on SU, the single moderator slot apparently discouraged some people from standing cause there were one or two candidates who had a near certain chance of winning. I don't really know this community, and who would stand for mod, but its worth taking into consideration. You may have more people standing simply cause they feel "Oh, I have a chance" rather than "X is almost certainly going to win, what's the point".

Its also worth considering more mods can be handy when you don't know what to do - On the rare occasions where we need to make a tough decisions, having other active moderators means you can bounce off ideas. SU tends to have 3-4 mods active in any timezone (overlapping of course!).

Its also worth remembering chat's a pretty good way to communicate with users, build and tap a brain trust and generally exercise soft power, and its worth considering that in a future moderator. It may not have the same weight and importance as meta but there's situations where its handy.

I'd also say, sometimes its better to have more mods with lower workloads than skirting on "enough". We do fine when I see 3-4 flags a day. I got grumpy when a user threw 20-30 "profanity" flags on old posts. Likewise, spare mods are handy when a user gets on your nerves and you want a cooler head to handle it. I once had someone get on my case, went the heck with it, and went to bed, trusting that my fellow mods would handle it. And they did.

At the end of the day, Its your choice and I'm pretty much an outsider to this community, but going for the additional mod feels like a good idea, with a 2 place vote.

Answer 7

We've never really needed more than three.

We could have four - or five, or 20 - that's fine - I just don't think that it gains us anything.

Why We Want One Above SSD And I

The workload is fine with two, we just want a suitable number of perspectives and to be able to take a vacation without it all falling on one person. Since the shift to better community moderation, however, we've done that several times without issue (waxy's been checked out for a long time, and SSD and I do have real lives and have been away for a week or two at a time without incident). It would just feel more polite not to have it just reduce to one.

Why Other Reasons For More Probably Don't Help Anything

Time zone coverage is not very important IMO - have we really had problems that have gone out of control in a short time that the community hasn't been able to handle? Users can close and vote to delete and such just fine, so this is isn't a problem we've ever had.

I don't think we need "more perspectives" because "SSD and I think exactly the same." We disagree on topics and we differ on how we'd handle various incidents - you can look in meta on questions where we've both posted and there's a lot of variance. Heck, I disagree with him on the question closure in that other recent meta Q that the OP user won't behave enough to get reopened; if he ever did I'd chime in on it with a different perspective. But people that are expecting any mods to be super different will probably be disappointed. We've had many mods over the history of the site, and the group has always been well aligned - before I was a mod, when it was Ace and Pat and RC Conley, when it was me and Brian and CRoss, and when it was me and SSD and waxeagle. All these folks are really different people, I bet long timers could read a post from any of these 8 people and guess who it was. But for some reason, once the kool-aid is drunk, we all end up being pretty aligned on how to run the site. Why? There's two factors at work.

1. The people who are willing to run for mod, which is generally a thankless job, have a high degree of sense of responsibility and buy-in to the site in the first place. We tried to get a couple folks to run last time who didn't want the hassle. So by the time you self-nominate, you're either obviously in over your head and don't get voted for, or already have a pretty good alignment with major policy issues.
2. Once they're elected and get to "patrol the streets" for a while, the remaining happy slappy libertarian theory dries up. Ask SSD about how his perspective changed from just being a high-rep user and becoming a mod. I'm sure he won't mind me quoting him from mod chat from a year after he got elected:

I had a pretty sharp perspective shift when I moved from loud-mouthed regular user to diamond mod; some things are just clearer from here because moderating them underlines practical concerns that were only theoretical from a user perspective.

So for those that think "well certainly more mods will mean changes," and by changes you mean suddenly comments won't be deleted and questions won't be closed and site norms won't be upheld - or that those mods won't sometimes do what they think is best even when people are yelling - you'll probably be disappointed. Once a person with a sense of responsibility gets responsibility, they end up doing the responsible thing. I don't see that as a "lack of diversity," it's called a helpful and constructive alignment.

Why More Might Be A Problem

Well, we need qualified nominees. We had an election just a couple years ago and many of the most qualified people on the site that we specifically urged to run wouldn't. So in the reductio ad absurdum, if we elected 5 more mods tomorrow, would some of those not really be great candidates just because we want to fill seats? But I imagine we can find 2.

The other potential downside is for those who want "less mod intervention" - with more mods, there's going to be more people at keyboards that will feel like they should intervene in something. If they were just high rep users doing it, it would probably be fine, but once it's a "MOD!" then people get into this weird us vs them mode.

And one final one - the concept of more mods got brought up on a recent meta question in response to discussion of a kind of activity that wasted mod time. The answer to time-wasting activities is not add more mods to handle it - we're exception handlers not garbage-men. I really wouldn't want "well there's more mods, so, they can handle it" to be a justification for poor site behavior or hygeine.

So to me, there's not a huge problem with more, just not particularly any benefit, so why go for "bigger government" unless there's an actual need? Remember high rep users can do 95% of what we can, and do, and should...

Answer 8

4 is a bad number

I don't like even numbers in governing bodies. It makes ties possible, and even if 'voting' isn't a concern per se I think it negatively affects the way people talk when there's an even split. I'd prefer 3 or 5, and 5 seems unnecessary and unreasonable. So I think 3's good.

What about better moderator accountability?

Wax Eagle has been gone for kinda a long time. I really don't like having only 2 mods. I think it would be good to do something to have rules/guidelines for our mods to call an election sooner next time. Gradual drop outs are gonna be, I think, the most prevalent kind of drop outs in our future and guidelines make deciding something like that easier and less punitive-feeling. Maybe if you're gone for 30 days without telling people (i.e. the other mods) you're taking a vacation? Idk. Something helpful.