It's unclear to me whether you intend this question seriously or as a joke but it seems like a reasonable opportunity either way for me to say some things related to this.
From very early in our history we made the decision that moderation should be done by people, not automations. We've often stated that, though it's not always known - and we actively discourage moderators - many of whom are excellently knowledgeable and capable programmers - to avoid automation of their tooling. We encourage them to use or create tools that support their efforts and make them simpler or more streamlined but we do not want them acting without human oversight.
There are some things we do automate. These things are generally well-known by community members and makes it so that when others who are not aware come across them, the actions can be explained. This includes things like:
- Deleting some questions that are old or poorly received.
- Invalidating votes in very extreme cases (which we don't explicitly reveal the rules for but it's generally known).
- Preventing or limiting participation on the site based on a variety of factors.
But, more frequently, we don't automate the decision-making; we automate drawing attention to cases that may be concerning, either to moderators or other community members with certain privileges. This includes things like:
I was a moderator at one point in time and making decisions about how to act on flags, how (and when) to communicate with users, and what to invest my time in were all really complex things to figure out. While I haven't been a mod for almost five years, I've been a CM for that time and have worked closely with mods to better understand their concerns and, particularly within the last year, work with an internal team to create new and better tooling for them.
In that time, there has been some discussion about what could be automated but it's never in the interest of replacing moderators. As with our guidance to them, we want to make their efforts simpler by giving them more context or helping draw attention to more issues so they don't have to go searching for them on their own.
While there may be cases where we identify things that we can automate completely, the likelihood is that this will be limited to (as it is now) very clear cases that really don't require moderator intervention and we'll ensure the mods and community are in agreement that these automations are reasonable.
There are several reasons for this -
- We highly value moderation by humans, particularly people with close ties to the communities they moderate.
- We do not want to replace moderators with AI both because AI is prone to errors and because we recognize that moderation is very complex and beyond the capabilities of any current AI.
- We have a general understanding with the communities that moderation will be done by humans.
All of these come together into the idea that the complexity of moderation requires human intervention because understanding a situation fully can't be done by computers - AI or otherwise - particularly when you remember that we have 180+ sites with site-specific rules and expectations from users.
Humans may not have the memory or data immediately to hand, which is why supporting mods with improved tooling is something we are putting a lot of effort into - but I don't think anyone wants us to have bots misunderstanding interactions between users and deciding to suspend them for behaviors that aren't actionable.
We see this already - while we went to a lot of effort to collect data and train our unfriendly robot, one of the reasons we haven't shipped it network wide is that we've received regular feedback from the SO mods that it flags many comments that aren't even close to being rude. If it just deleted all of the comments instead of flagging them - it'd be removing potentially important information in the comments that a human moderator would have recognized and retained.
So, I'll say it one more time:
We feel human moderation is important and not something that AI can do. While we may look into options that use AI to help or support moderators, that is the extent of what we are considering.
NB: While I don't speak for the moderators, I will say that no one is forced to be a moderator here or to remain one. Mods don't have terms and they're not required to complete a specific period of activity. If a mod decides that they no longer want the role, we let them step down and, if the other mods need more support, we run an election to find a new moderator.
As such, while your concern for the mods is commendable, I hope that the mods already understand the situation and feel like they can bow out whenever moderation is too stressful or is no longer fun for them.
