Do we need more moderators?

Question

Joseph required me to set a threshold. Let's say that the answer to the title question is "yes" if this post reaches at least 30 upvotes in one month's time.

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Recently:

• three top users deleted their accounts,
• two top users left the site (without deleting their accounts), one of them was suspended several times before (in my opinion, the past behavior of the people involved was not carefully taken into account in this circumstance, as far as I can judge with the little info available)
• in general, I feel that touchiness and rudeness are growing (a couple of episodes make me think that).

I believe there is a problem.

Now we have only three mods, all of them are European.

One of them is English and the other two are German, that is, all of them are Anglo-Saxon speakers.

To cover all the time zones, I think we need, at least:

• an American (better if South American, see below)
• an Asian
• a person from Oceania.

And to better understand misunderstandings created by language barriers, we should also have:

• an African
• a South American.

As marmot suggested in his answer, it would also be great to have a more gender-balanced moderator team, since the current ones are all men.

To clear any doubt, I do not want to propose myself as a moderator because:

1. I am European, too
2. I have no time at all
3. I am mean.

How do the mod elections work? Can we have more than three mods?

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Update: Christian Hupfer (one of the users who recently left the site and deleted the accounts) wrote to me to explain the reasons for his leaving. He authorized me to talk about them, I try to sum them up:

• a growing number of just-do-it-for-me and otherwise boring questions
• too many duplicates answered instead of being closed
• too much attention to TikZ posts, and too few attention to the ones which would deserve it
• too much childish talks in chat (ducks & Co.) and fun posts
• growing rudeness
• ingratitude.

Hence, apart from the growing rudeness, there is not much mods can do.

Answer 1

It seems to me that there are three different questions here. And I'm sort of agnostic about all of them.

More moderation?

The first question is whether we need more moderation to counter rudeness or other sorts of dissatisfaction with the site. I don't generally find this site particularly rude or unpleasant. Like anyone else, I sometimes encounter behaviour that makes me wince. But that's life. I know nothing about moderation action, whether directed at well-known or not well-known users.

Anyway, I really doubt that we need more moderation, as such. Mostly, I think, the site community as a whole manages to make its feelings reasonably clear, as it did in fact on this thread. I suppose we can all help the moderators work efficiently by flagging things for their attention iff they really need their attention.

I'm afraid I incline to the fatalistic view that if somewhere needs constant policing to avoid falling into antisocial rancour, then the game is up. I don't for a moment think we are in that position. But if we were ... I don't think more, or more aggressive, moderation would help us.

More diverse moderators?

A second question is whether it would be a good idea to have a moderation team that represents a more diverse range of backgrounds, points of view or (prosaically) time zones. I'm always in favour of diversity in leadership, because I find from my own practical experience that it helps encourage a diverse community. But, for all that, I rather doubt that in this particular case that would justify appointing extra mods. Why? Because -- and I think this is a good thing -- I don't think the mods here function as "leaders"; I don't think that they "set the tone" or dominate the discussion; I find that they largely disappear into the background, and I think they deserve credit for doing so. So in this particular case I doubt that having a wider range of moderators would have much impact. I don't know when elections are held. I'd certainly like to encourage as wide a range of candidates as possible when they are. But that's a different thing.

Ennui and the end of days?

Finally, I detect in the question a certain sense that the site is currently a bit "below par", compared perhaps to the early days, with people leaving and so forth. Well, I have mixed feelings. I don't think it's surprising to find people leaving. There comes a point, perhaps, when people have "had enough", quite naturally; when the questions start to get dull, and the most dedicated expert wants to move on. That's not necessarily unhealthy: it can make room for new folk, which is a good thing. If you've been around here for a long while, I suppose it's easy to find that most of the most interesting questions have been asked and answered, and hunting down duplicates or answering very specific questions can get tiresome. I don't think we should be worried if people move on.

There probably are some basic defects, almost genetic defects, in the structure of this site. After a certain point, when the "big, common" issues have been addressed in canonical answers, there may not be all that much to do, and it's maybe natural that the site becomes dominated by sometimes rather tedious issues. Those issues matter for the users who post questions about them. They may be interesting enough for intermediate users to be willing to spend time on. But I think it's sort of inevitable that real experts are going to turn their attention elsewhere, and probably it's healthy for them and for the site that they do.

Is there anything we could do?

Yes. As always. We watch our own behaviour. If we don't like rudeness, let's make sure we are not rude. If we want to encourage questions, let's be encouraging. If we want to encourage real understanding of TeX, let's post answers that explain. If we want to discourage DIFM questions, let's resist the temptation to Do It For Them. If we want to encourage new answerers, let old-timers be generous in not rushing to answer questions, and let's all be generous in upvoting carefully done questions and answers. Let's resolve not to close early and often. Let's resolve not to ask for MWEs on questions we have no intention of answering. All those things, which we all probably know. Moderators cannot, however dedicated, to that for us.

Answer 2

Let me start by saying that I am overall very happy with what the moderators were and are doing. Please do not forget that they are doing all this in their "free" time! (The only exception might be two suspensions of a top user which I may not have enough background information to understand.) So let me thank the moderators for all they have done!

Having said this, one should also consider that in this millennium diversity is becoming increasingly important. That is, the composition of the moderator team may be something that sends certain signals to new and not-so-new users. For example, one may interpret the graphs showing the activity on this site vs. time of the day in (at least) two ways:

1. for some reasons, LaTeX is most popular in Europe, and then it is no surprise that the majority of users, and hence the moderators, are from this region, or
2. our community is dominated by people with a certain background, which implies a threshold for potential users with a different background, such that they are less likely to join and/or contribute.

Clearly, I do not have enough data that might allow me to judge which of these interpretations is more accurate. On the other hand, it is known that adding diversity to the "leadership" is often instrumental attract talented contributors and to improve the atmosphere. Therefore, I feel that @CarLaTeX has a very good point, and would like to add to her wish list

a more gender-balanced moderator team.

I do see the point by Stefan Kottwitz that increasing the number of moderators may make it more difficult for them to make decisions. On the other hand, if they had a model in which only a certain number of moderator votes is required for certain actions to be performed, this may not be an unsurmountable difficulty. And such a model would also mean that the burden of moderation is shared among more users. Let me stress that this proposal is not because our current moderators did something wrong (which they didn't IMHO) but because I think that CarLaTeX has a good suggestion that might be worth trying (and which does not seem to have any major disadvantages).

P.S. As you can see from what is written, I do not have a detailed picture how moderation works on our site. So these thoughts may be completely unrealistic because, say, there is a rule that the number of moderators has to be 3. In case I missed something of this sort, please let me know. I will be happy to delete this post.

Answer 3

A few thoughts.

It happens that somebody leaves because of moderation action (with reasons). And every suspension is a moderator action. So you want to have more moderators? ;-)

Any suspended user who is proud of the reason can go ahead and tell here. Otherwise we don't make things public since we value privacy and a better future together. No finger pointing.

And by the way, a medium/long suspension is not made easily. A short suspension is the second serious signal while the first is usually just a message. If it comes to a longer suspension, there's the "past behavior" you mentioned that you may not see in public.

We all can moderate here. Being friendly, welcoming, we all create and maintain the atmosphere. We current mods usually keep it relaxed and quiet and act when users can not solve it on their own and especially when our messages won't help. If you would like to have it it more "organized", well, then get more moderators. ;-) We mods usually agree in decisions by writing emails between us. If you would like to have more opinions and emotions on the table, add more diverse cultural background and more timezones to have more time for working on it. ;-)