Use Meta as a Moderator Gauge

Question

The administrator note at the top of the pages currently encourages us to use our votes on SuperUser because they will be selecting moderators soon. I am not quite sure what this implies (mods chosen based on activity or rep score?), but it got me thinking about how to best choose moderators for the site, and I believe Meta is how to do it.

I think we as a community have already demonstrated an ability to discuss what we believe a site should aim towards (in this case the discussion about defining SuperUser). I do think that had a large hand in why I was asked to be a mod for the site. I believe we could use that same idea for choosing future moderators for SuperUser (and even for other sites as they come through the pipeline).

What I am getting at is this:

Your best moderators are going to be those who are already familiar with how the system functions as well as how the community functions. High performance on Meta is a good indicator of those factors.

We can generally determine who is going to be a good moderator based on how they perform on Meta, since Meta is not only a discussion area for topics about the growth of StackOverflow, but also for helping troubleshoot newer users. Both of these qualities are pretty important for a mod to have.

Reputation scores generally aren't a good indicator of performance on a site other than activity, but at least on Meta, high scores here can generally signify that you are indeed invested in the community enough to engage in all the discussions. Combine that type of enthusiasm for the sites and the community along with a genuine interest in the future of a particular site, and you have all the ingredients necessary to make a good moderator.

Answer 1

I completely agree. A moderator doesn't have to be a DBA or network expert to know when a question doesn't belong on SF. That extends to the other sites as well.

The most important factor in determining who would be a good moderator is an understanding of the community we are looking to build.

Answer 2

I agree with TheTXI. Especially if I see this comment of the (current) rep leader on SU (John T):

Don't forget i have a lot more reputation to downvote than you do :)

Regardless of the smiley, I don't think he got it. I consider this as a threat.
This one would not be a good moderator.

Answer 3

I mentioned this on IRC when TheTXI and I were discussing this issue, but I'm so enamored of my own voice that I'll post it here, too:

I know Jeff is opposed to spending lots of time engaged in meta discussion, but the role of a moderator is extremely meta. He or she isn't concerned with correctness, but with how things "fit" within the confines of the site. Luckily, we have a way to see people who care about these things.

Now, that doesn't make it the only metric in place, but I think it's better than two weeks of activity on SU. Of course, there's nothing saying both SU activity and Meta activity can't be criteria, but I know which I'd more heavily weight.

Answer 4

I think Jeff has made it clear that he considers spending too much time on "meta topics" to be... somewhat unhealthy.

Being a SU moderator could be considered sort of a penance, an act of contrition for your sins on this site. Therefore, I feel this is an excellent suggestion.

Answer 5

This makes a lot of sense. I, too, have seen a lot of new faces at the top of SuperUser, and I'm not sure that they've proven themselves enough to have the power and responsibility to act in the capacity of moderator. This is not to say that they wouldn't, but I'm not willing to hand over moderator control to someone that's never closed a question before.

If we assume that a prerequisite for becoming a moderator is at least familiarity with the reputation tools of the system, then we can examine the other accounts that the top users have and see if they have any accounts with 10k+ rep. This turns out to be relatively few. Here's a list of the users on the top two pages on SuperUser, sorted by reputation:

splattne         2,601
JP               2,110
TheTXI           1,532
Jon Skeet        1,376
Johannes Rössel    911
Oscar Reyes        879
Paolo Bergantino   840
Lasse V. Karlsen   662
chaos              617
Kyle Cronin        586
Mehrdad            571
dbr                569

There's also the fact that the number of moderators on the sites seems to have grown rapidly with the release of Meta and SuperUser. Now that we have 14 moderators on the various sites^*, I think it might be easier and safer to promote from within. For example, take splattne. He's a moderator on ServerFault and also the #2 SuperUser, and it seems obvious to me to promote him to moderator there as well. (a case could be made for having all the moderators as moderators on all the sites, as I've occasionally been unable to resolve account issues on other sites because I'm just a regular user)

A possible compromise could be to grant a number of active contributors to SuperUser immediate access to the 10k moderator tools. That way users could get experience closing, opening, deleting, etc. without the community having to take the leap of trusting them completely with moderator status.

^{* Jeff Joel Jarrod Geoff Marc Bill Denny Kara Stefan Kyle Tom Joel Sean TheTXI}

Answer 6

Gee, is someone sniffing around for a moderator post? :)

But in all seriousness, using myself as an example, I'd reasonably active here but would make a terrible SU mod. Why? Because for that particular subject matter, I just don't care.

The problem with a "meta-moderator" is you might end up with someone who's more interested in the process that the material or the outcome. There are certainly users on here that are very active that would (imho) make terrible moderators.

As such, I think activity (in terms of frequency, regularity, level-hededness and predictability) on the site or sites in question is of paramount importance. I would probably classify people into three categories:

• Question-askers: these people are the "consumers" of the system;
• Answerers: these people are the "producers" of the system; and
• Editors: these are the "process-wonks" of the system.

Not to disparage editing (which certainly does have value) or the people that do it, but there does seem to be something attention-seeking and hanger-on'ish about it in some people. Meta is really an extension of that. Moderators (imho) should be those inclined to help, and that is the answerer category.

Answer 7

I think that TheTXI has a great point. Afterall, it was only after some activity here on meta that he was given mod access to SU and that seems to have been a great, positive change.

https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5787/superuser-com-moderator-nomination

I also think that we can simply look at some of the active folks on SU and can easily identify some of them as being a good mod fit.

Answer 8

I agree that if you have high reputation on Meta means a lot of people probably think you either know a lot about the site or have something useful to add to the functioning of the site.

But only because I don't post here, doesn't mean I don't read the questions or answers, nor that I don't read the blog OR listen to the podcast. So Meta activity alone is hardly a valid measure to judge someone's understanding with.

Proving myself "worthy" on either SO or SF would be nearly impossible due to my lack of knowledge of those respective fields, would that make me a bad mod per definition? That's perhaps up to other people to decide.