Should the diamond be given to you at a certain reputation?

Question

I couldn't find another question on Meta Stack Exchange that answers this issue.

Let's see the official Help page for some info here:

Trusted user

Awarded at: 20,000 reputation

Trusted users are allowed to perform trusted actions, including:

• Voting to delete answers with score of -1 or lower
• Voting to delete questions with a score of -3 or lower immediately after they are closed
• Voting to undelete answers except those deleted by a moderator

In my opinion, the diamond should automatically be given to you at 500,000 combined (from all Stack Exchange sites including Stack Overflow) reputation.

Answer 1

If there's a moderator deleted answer that a non-moderator feels should be undeleted they can already flag the answer, explaining why the post no longer merits being deleted. If the moderators still feel that the post should be deleted and the user still disagrees, they can post on meta, and the community as a whole can discuss whether or not deletion is appropriate in this situation. Moderators have a history of abiding by community consensus in such situations (if there is indeed wide consensus) outside of very rare situations where there hands really are tied (i.e. DMCA takedowns and other non-negotiable deletions). Situations like this are rare enough that these more involved tools are appropriate.

If there really is that much disagreement between moderators and non-moderators, it's for the best to actually talk it out, rather than having each group just silently voting to reverse the other's, and it happens rarely enough that it's not any sort of scaling problem to have a meta discussion for such topics.

That's more than adequate checks to ensure moderator posts deleted erroneously, or to which community members disagree with, can be evaluated and undeleted if appropriate. The whole point of moderator deletion being permanent is so that in cases where some portion of the community is getting out of hand there can be a final word to settle things down.

The diamond should automatically be given to you at 50,000 reputation.

The entire reason we have moderators is because there are some problems with giving people lots of moderation privileges just by being active members of a community. Usually it works great, but sometimes there are problems coming to a consensus, sometimes people abuse their privileges, or for whatever reason, someone needs to be brought in to resolve a problem that can't be solved by "normal" users of the community. That's diamond moderators. They exist to handle the exceptional cases that normal users can't. By definition, the privileges they're given that higher privileged non-moderators don't have are privileges that can't be trusted to be given to regular community members.

Answer 2

In my opinion, the diamond should automatically be given to you at 500,000 combined (from all StackExchange sites including StackOverflow) reputation.

The main problem with this is that while reputation reflects, to an extent, your familiarity with the site, the amount of subject matter expertise you have and the level of respect your peers have for you, this is something slightly different than the qualities looked for in moderators. Therefore, on larger sites we hold elections where candidates can present themselves and their vision on moderating the site; on smaller sites the Stack Overflow staff appoints users they know to be capable of being good moderators.

Also, being knowledgeable about one topic (say, solving programming problems) does not mean you're in expert in chess, biology or life hacks and automatically capable of moderating that site. Combining reputation, as in your proposal, simply doesn't add up (pun intended).

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_{(answers to the initial version of your question)}

100k users (actually, 10k users) can already flag deleted posts, asking for undeletion. IMHO, that's already sufficient power. Moderators don't delete posts for nothing; they have been elected or appointed to use that power responsibly.

not even Shog9 (the person with the highest reputation on this site, 343,090 reputation as of 11/27/18) can undelete vote it.

Except that he can, because he is a (the?) Community Manager and has ♦ powers on all sites.

Change the best answer to a question (gives 20 reputation to the user with the best answer)

You mean changing which answer is accepted, right? Not even ♦ moderators have that power, only the author of the question can do that. Actually, it means very little. The best answer, the answer with the highest score, is determined by the thousands of users who form the community. Very democratic, I might add.

Be instantly accepted to work at StackExchange

We simply have too many 100k users for this to be feasible. Stack Overflow alone has over 600 users with more than 100k reputation.