Should we elect new moderators?

Question

At least last few months we have been observing except Pandya, there is almost no activity from other moderators. I am not blaming them as such, because every individual has their own personal commitments to do.

Above claim is based on following statistics(Order is Highly active to Less active):

Pandya :

Last Question posted on meta: Oct 09 '20

Last Answer posted on meta: Sep 16 '20

TheDestroyer :

Last Question posted on meta: Apr 26 '18

Last Answer posted on meta: Dec 3 '19

Keshav Srinivasan

Last Question posted on meta: Jun 23 '17

Last Answer posted on meta: Dec 25 '17

Why I took only meta statistics is because an active/healthy meta can make the main site better. For example check this question: Review of recent change in blockquote appearance It hardly could receive 2 upvotes. and because of that no SE staffs showed any interest.

If my observation is right, let us have a fair election or whatever works for Moderator selection during Beta phase on SE Site.

Answer 1

The long awaited question has been answered through this meta post:

2020 Potential Community Moderator Election - Community Interest Check

I would encourage everyone to participate in this election since it's gonna be the first one on this site. :)

Answer 2

1. Agree with your observations. I requested the mods to make your post 'featured' but it has been pending since April 29. Not sure why. Maybe there is a conflict of interest here.

   please add 'featured' tag to this question – sv.   Apr 29 at 14:26   pending

2. Another issue I noticed with this SE, in general, is that rude/abusive comments/posts aren't handled (edited/deleted) by mods themselves when they first notice it. They seem to wait until some users find and flag them as offensive before they are willing to act on them.

   For comparison, on Islam SE, mods seem to be pretty ruthless when it comes to enforcing the CoC. Mods of this site, however, haven't participated much in the discussion on referring to current day Westerners and non-Indians as 'mlecchas'. The only mod that's currently active on meta left a mere comment hidden away under one of the posts:

   This is not a Hindu site but is a site about Hinduism. This word shouldn't be used for addressing/targeting foreign people. – Pandya♦   Sep 25 '19 at 11:05

   Frankly, after reading this comment, I was left wondering whether the mod is merely his expressing his opinion or stating the site policy on how the flags will be handled. If it was the latter, shouldn't it be posted as an answer for better visibility?

   It is only after a fellow user demanded an explanation by way of a separate post (Call out to Mods! Why no action from almost 3 years?), is there a proper response from the mod.

   And despite all the discussion on mlecchas, some users continue to refer to Westerners in a derogatory way:

   Can we trust white gurus? (archived copy; original post deleted by SE staff 5 days after posting).

3. Same goes for answers that completely lack or use Wikipedia and blogs as reference. Unless there's a flag, rarely is a citation banner added by mods themselves. On some sites like Skeptics SE I noticed mods are more active and add these banners immediately upon noticing the problem (not waiting for user flags).

While I understand the job of SE moderators and how much time they want to invest in the site is completely voluntary, some of the above issues can be resolved by bringing in new mods.

Answer 3

My view on this matter may reflect ignorance as i am member of just one SE site - which is HSE. So I wouldn't know to what extent other sites are successful because of moderator activity as compared to other factors such as subject matter, quality of participants etc.

Now I can see that mods have been visiting the site , but not all are posting in meta, chat or main regularly. So it is safe to assume that they are doing activities like flag, suspending spammers etc.

The only objective way to determine if moderators need to be changed before end of term is to check the goals set at the beginning of their term , and determine which are not being met and for what reason. It maybe because of developments outside their control .

The other way to determine would be if one mod is complaining, but that is not the case here.

Answer 4

The following is the extract from Area 51.

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1. Out of total 14,219 users of this site, 596 are avid users. Excellent, but how many of these 529 avid users have regularly been visiting the site? They can be counted on the fingers of the hand.

2. Out of requisite 10 questions per day on average to be asked for considering it to be a healthy beta, HSE is receiving 5.4 questions now.

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The Core/avid users that have been visiting the site HSE, are not more than 5 on an average. So who are going to guide/moderate the visitors to this HSE?

The old timers had already left the site. The knowledgeable and senior members like Rickross, Sarvabhouma, Swift Pushkar, etc, are not visiting the site now a days.

I don't know the reasons for the absence of senior members.

So whom for the elections are being proposed now?

Unless all the old timers have been contacted through emails, a reasonable discussion takes place, it is of no use in elections, in my view.

Sorry to say, this site is already on ventilator.