A letter to SE Inc. - please protect our moderators

Question

I care about moderators. They are here to make their community a safe and "happy" place. They help newcomers, and they make you feel welcome. They protect you against bigots and rude people. They tell you when you are being unfriendly and help you improve your behavior.

I love them for that. I love them because they will protect their community no matter what. They will make sure everyone behaves and that everything stays friendly.

They aren't perfect. They sometimes make mistakes and they sometimes get angry, just like any other human would.

But I know them, I trust them and I know they will be here for me if and when I need it. That's why I, too, want to be there for them if and when they need it.

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Not so long ago, I didn't know anything about the "Teacher's Lounge" (TL). And then a friend privately complained to me that the discussion going on over there was making them feel horrible. And then, Aza resigned and after that, the whole "Monica Cellio" situation blew up.

But it wasn't over.

Another moderator that I have on very high esteem resigned for mostly the same reason Aza did.

And then I learned other stuff and I learned about how and why TL could be a toxic place sometimes.

And the issue essential boils down to what? To the fact that, in a room full of 200 people, no one had actually any moderator power (because everyone had them).

You can't just throw 200 people in the same place and expect them to behave nicely all the time. It just doesn't work.

I'm not a moderator, and I shouldn't be the one saying that. But, with the recent event, I have been made aware of an issue and I can't close my eyes to it. Because I care about moderators. Because I want them to be well and happy.

I hope SE Inc. is already aware that there is an issue here and I hope they are already working on fixing it.

But if not, please SE Inc., do something. Protect our moderators the same way they protect us, regular users.

Don't expect them to be perfect and don't expect them to keep their calm in every situation. Because they won't, and because they can't.

Please, remember that moderators are human too and put safety in place for when their humanity will take the best part of them.

I care for my moderators, please protect them.

Answer 1

A few notes:

• You're exactly right: it isn't fair to expect hundreds of people from a dizzying variety of backgrounds and cultures, wielding an even larger variety of languages, interests and beliefs, to get along with one another 100% of the time.

• Chat is notorious for triggering the worst in otherwise reasonable people; real-time conversation can be rough, and... Well, the more people in one place, the rougher it gets.

• There are way more than 200 moderators who use the Teachers' Lounge. However, most of them don't use it daily. This is good and bad: while only a few dozen people are there often, the population of regulars rotates over time and the associated culture with it... Leaving the vast majority of moderators who drop in to ask questions unprepared for what awaits them. Meanwhile, any regular who might find themselves at the center of a controversy will quickly find that they can't just have one conversation about it... Each day brings new people who will ask the same questions and be quite surprised at being told, curtly, that their question isn't welcome because it has already been answered thrice on each of the last several days.

...In short, it's long ago gone beyond a small little back room for a few people to trade tips; it's a decent sized community on its own, with all of the problems that entails. And... It's effectively unmoderated.

That changes today. For the next few weeks, we'll be trying something different:

• The global moderator chatroom will live here, on https://chat.meta.stackexchange.com/. It will still be private, accessible only to folks who moderate somewhere on the network or are employees... But most of the people with access will have no special privileges.
• Starting out, the room will be moderated by employees and The MSE Mods. All normal chat moderation tools will be available: kick, flag, suspend, remove access.
• There's now also the possibility of appointing Room Owners who can lend a hand in providing guidance and oversight.
• The rules don't change: we expect folks to be respectful, friendly, inclusive, constructive... All that good stuff from the Code of Conduct. The only difference is that now there'll be ... less-than-catastrophic options for enforcing those rules.

Right now, there's no special support for this in the system, meaning some nice things that were possible in the old room aren't available. This is a test, to see if providing normal chat moderation is effective at addressing the problems we've been seeing more and more often here. Maybe it won't work at all; maybe it won't be enough. Maybe a 400-person perpetual chatroom is just a really bad idea.

But if this does work out, we'll figure out how to provide these same options on an ongoing basis. Because we care about these moderators too, and it's high time we did something to stop them from hurting.

Answer 2

This is something that we're keenly aware of.

We kind of expect the Community Moderation team to moderate us, but we outnumber them by almost ten to one. We also talk about ten times more, which adds to the load exponentially.

The problem is that a "toxic environment" appears toxic to outsiders, but to the people inside the conversation, the topic is meaningful and important. It's really difficult to respect the importance of those conversation while still keeping them within bounds of approachability to others. We could slice those conversations into another chatroom, but that also ends up excluding people.

It's a tough issue, we're aware of it, and it's on the agenda. But, we have a lot of other stuff that we're dealing with.

This isn't wholly on SE. We, as moderators, do need to find ways of increasing the efficiency of working together whilst retaining respect for each other's opinions and points of view.

Answer 3

I think there could be a simple answer, within the community: the moderators find a set of simple rules for the TL, or any similar "private channel".

Then those community moderators that have access to say, the TL, vote distinct "TL moderators".

I really wouldn't be looking towards Stack Exchange Inc. here. The moderators have proven that they can moderate much larger communities.

(Maybe) it simply boils down to: accepting that such a TL-like place needs moderation, too ... and to then "go figure how to do that".

Sure, if there are really larger "fractions" within the set of moderators, then a "3rd party" might be necessary. But again, when we normal users elect moderators, the underlying theme is "we users are moderating us users". SE Inc. provides the means to help with that (or they don't do it), but in the end: moderators are just elected community members. So why should "their" community depend on a vastly different "moderation model"?!