Nomination Criteria for Moderator Elections

Question

It is very easy to be a candidate in a moderator election. Only three requirements are needed:

1. To be 18 or over

2. To have earned 300 reputation points (equivalent of thirty upvotes)

3. Not be suspended on any SE site in the last 12 months.

In theory, these requisites allow the following scenarios

• A user who has never posted a question, answer or commented on meta can be elected as moderator for life.

• A user who has not reviewed, suggested an edit or edited a single post that was not theirs can be elected as a moderator.

• A user might not contribute, participate or even visit a site in the two or more years prior to an election but be qualified to be a nominee.

• The candidate score can be as low as 0, where 40 is the maximum score. I don't believe this has ever happened on any election on any SE site but the rules do not explicitly state a minimum score is necessary.

For more detail: Are you wondering how a candidate’s score is calculated?

For context: one former nominee's score today is 4/40. But the scores of three former ELL moderators are 33/40, 37/40, and 38/40.

A community which allows their least active and lowest-rep members to run for election, may be an example of a free and democratic election but it is potentially a dangerous situation. Ideally, in a healthy flourishing community, the weakest candidates should easily lose.

However, as we have seen in the past, ELL users are typically reluctant to nominate themselves when an election is being held. Last year we had four nominees running, this year only three. So, in the future we might again face the situation where two seats are open and only three candidates running but instead of having three strong candidates there might be two under-qualified nominees guaranteeing that at least one of them will be elected.

What do I mean by an under-qualified nominee? It is a user who has not contributed significantly or actively sought to improve the site. In fact, before a user is trusted to cast close and reopen votes, they must first earn 3K.

3,000 ⇅ cast close and reopen votes       help decide whether posts are off-topic or duplicates

If a nominee has not earned 1k, Stack Exchange suggests that they are not an "established user".

1,000 🏆 established user       you've been around for a while; see vote counts

If a nominee has not earned 500 rep, they are not allowed to use the review queues.

500 ⇅ access review queues       Access the First posts and Late answers review queues

And yet once elected, the under-qualified ♦ moderator can unilaterally put on hold, lock, close, reopen, and migrate questions. They can also delete and undelete comments, answers and questions. They can convert answers into comments, freely edit posts, and suspend users without knowing anything about that person's history owing to the fact the newly-elected moderator has not participated in years or regularly visited the main site. It is worth reminding that Stack Exchange does not allow a community to change their mind about a moderator once he or she is elected. Unless the moderator voluntarily steps down (retires) or is fired by Stack Exchange, an unqualified, ineffectual moderator will be allowed to hold that position permanently. For more information: Who are the diamond moderators, and what is their role?

For all the reasons above, I suggest that the aforementioned minimum requirements be revised. I would appreciate hearing the community's opinion.

Answer 1

Here’s a devil’s advocate argument for why additional requirements should not be added.

It is worse for a site to have too few moderators than to have moderators that may have to be taught how things work. Most of the mod work that is really necessary for a site is not skilled labor. Having too few mods could cause the existing mods to get burnt out and resign, putting the entire moderation workload on already overburdened staff.

If a moderator causes a lot of problems, there is a system in place to remove them. The reputation limit is high enough that we have some idea how they engage with the site, and the age requirement means they can be held accountable for violating the mod agreement.

Answer 2

My understanding is that no minimum number of votes is required to win an election. For example, if only one person voted in an election, then that person's top choice would be elected as a moderator (and other top choices would also be elected if multiple moderator positions were at stake).

One possibility, therefore, would be to implement a threshold for being elected as moderator (for example, being selected as one the top candidates on at least a certain number of ballots). This would have the advantage of not limiting eligibility for candidacy (so that voters would still get a relatively broad slate to choose from) while limiting election winners to only those people who received strong support from voters.

This would still require an exemption from SE's election rules.

(For the record, I'm not necessarily averse to Mari-Lou's proposal but am suggesting this as a possible alternative or even something that could be done in addition.)

Answer 3

I think that applying formal requirements as a way to weed out users who might not do well as moderators is likely to be an ineffective technique. An informed human judgement is needed here, not a list of boxes to check off.

I would hope that the users as a group can be trusted not to vote for candidates who are likely not to do the job well.

I would be in favor of raising the bar slightly, to match the rep levels needed to access privileges similar to those that come with a mod position. perhaps a rep level of 1-2k. But consider the case of a rising relatively new user. This user has over the past 6 months been doing the kind of things the question suggests, posting on ell.meta, posting on the main ell site with good questions and/or answers, flagging improper posts, using the review queues. But the user hasn't been active that long, and has only built up say 750 rep and is only partway to the relevant badges when a mod election corms up. Elections may not happen all that often. Should we be deprived of this user's services?

Note that I would not meet the badge requirements for SO on this site, because I do not yet have the deputy badge, although I'm about 85% there, IIRC.

The feature change that in my view would help more is to provide a way for the community to indicate a lack of continuing support for a mod, and to ask SE to remove the mod pending a new election. Or to make the position of mod have a fixed term, say 2-4 years. After that the mod would need to stand for re-election. Both of those would, however, require network-wide changes, as I understand it, and might be hard to get wide support for.

As for "shaping the community" I am not sure how much i really expect mods qua mods to do that. There are a number of experienced and respected posters whose opinions are likely to influence how others do things. Some of thse are mods. Some are former mods (well at least one is.) Some have never been mods. Being a mod may give a bit of a boost to the influence that a user has, but mostly that comes from leading by example, in my view. I would hope the mods pay attention to such widely-respected users here, even those who are not mods.