Can we turn down the campaign heat, please?

Question

Watching some of the moderator nomination comment threads, I get the mental image of a bucket brigade. And all the buckets contain gasoline.

I'm not terribly surprised or offended by those who are campaigning on a "salted earth" approach to moderation. The fact that they're choosing to take those approaches is no surprise to anyone. What does surprise me are those who are trying to advocate for a less extreme approach while throwing more gas on comment fires. The fact that those people are mods in one form or another frankly baffles me.

Since we like examples on Meta, and I can't directly link to these comments...

It kinda sounds like you've correctly identified the problem, and then... Arrived at the status quo as the solution. Let's face it: as a community, your reputation for cruelty, snark, and general unhelpfulness is unmatched - even Programmers, which attracts far fewer questions per day and rejects nearly all of them, doesn't come close to generating the levels of straight-up vitriol that y'all do. And so, upon observing that the only folks willing to still come here are utterly lost and desperate, your solution is... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0VjPNKc0VsU

(Taking cheap, easy shots at the entire community? Seriously?)

Wow, you're all crazy. I for one do not endorse Hopelessnoob as a mod for reasons that @Shog9 has mentioned. I put this nomination in the same bucket as Evan Carrols'.

(Hmm. Rereading that, I think I know where my fixation for buckets came from.)

As our friends Evan and TheCleaner have reminded us, you can't stop someone from running for office, no matter how off the wall their reasons for self-nomination are. You don't have to like the nominees. More importantly, you don't have to like their reasons for campaigning. But if you do want to voice some disapproval, for the love of bacon, please don't make our larger problems worse by taking cheap shots at the candidates or the larger Serverfault community. Say your piece and go. It doesn't have to be pink and fluffy, but there is a line and the regulars should know what it is.

It may seem like I'm talking to a select few here, but the fact that we have mods (both SE and SF) feeding into this problem sets a terrible example for the rest of us. It's for this reason that I'm taking a time out to say this is not a cool thing. If you want to have a go at being the voice of reason, be reasonable. Waiving your right to do so only helps to ensure that we all burn the house down before the bad questions and low participation do.

tl;dr, if you have the capacity for not setting us all on fire, please remember to exercise it. Pretty please?

Answer 1

I didn't intend that comment as a "cheap shot" - there's only so much you can say in the space of a comment.

A little bit of background might help here: along with most of the people on my team, I spend a fair bit of time doing support work - helping folks who are trying to learn to use these sites when they get stuck. When such people post questions on meta, or use the "contact us" link at the bottom of every page, we get notified. Usually, these problems are pretty straight-forward: they were unclear in their writing or just misunderstood what was on-topic for the site they had trouble with. In a great many instances, I need only point them to the comments or close reasons below their question for a succinct explanation of where they went wrong.

But I dread questions about Server Fault:

• Your site-specific off-topic reasons border on worthless; it's very difficult for an outsider (and I include myself in this group) to suss out the reasoning behind why "Questions must be relevant to professional system administration" or "Questions must demonstrate a minimal understanding of the problem being solved" are used in some situations and not others - much less what should be done to correct the problem (if anything can be done).
• There's a really bizarre tendency here to answer questions in comments, and then shut down the question. Perhaps this is born of a desire to be helpful while still being strict? But it sends a mixed message, particularly when no one bothers to say what's wrong with the question.
• Y'all have a penchant for getting into arguments with authors instead of just stating a problem and walking away. And not just a few of you. I've even had to warn some moderators about this behavior. There's a culture of one-upmanship that seems to encourage playing to an audience instead of trying to provide useful criticism.

I'm not saying this behavior is pervasive, but it's been wide-spread enough for long enough that I've come to expect it. And quite honestly, it makes me reluctant to even engage y'all here; there are too few hours in the day to spend them arguing for someone's idle entertainment, so if that's what I have to expect then my time is better spent elsewhere.

And the last thing I need is another "exceptionally snarky and cruel" moderator here creating messes for someone else to clean up. If that's honestly what anyone thinks is necessary, then they haven't been paying attention here for the past few years.

It's up to the community here to decide who gets elected. But I do have the minimum rep necessary to vote like anyone else, and the ability to comment, and I intend to use both judiciously. I strongly encourage the rest of you to do likewise.

Answer 2

I am normally a person of mild temperament. I normally don't call people on their bullshit or make waves unless it's something fairly serious.

An election is a serious business, and it's perhaps the most appropriate place for these statements to be made.

Additionally, I don't really see anything wrong with either of those two comments. Of course I'm biased because the last one was mine. But if I believe that someone is going to make a bad choice for a moderator, then if I can't tell anyone during an election, when can I tell them?

Answer 3

For what it's worth, I don't believe my platform has much in common with a gasoline bucket brigade, or earth-salting. I do appreciate the metaphor though.

The reason I advocate the approach that I do is to try and resuscitate the community out of the extremely defensive mode I've seen it fall into over the past year and a bit.

That isn't an attack on the community at all, of course. I understand that when you constantly see low-quality content and people rending their garments and gnashing their teeth, it creates a pretty hostile atmosphere.

We do need to calm down, in general, both in the election and on the site.

Putting questions on hold should not be a vitriolic act; it should be de-escalating. When the question is rightly placed on hold, it is.

The intention isn't to scorch the earth, so much as to enable people to concentrate on the good content that belongs here instead of the awful content that does not.

Answer 4

Why should the moderators treat each other with any more respect and dignity than the people who come to this site for help?!