2020 Moderator Election

I've been reflecting on this, and I've decided to nominate myself (Ted Wrigley) for pro tem moderator. I'm not usually a 'joiner', and I dislike self-promotion, but... I see the need, and I have the skills. No sense shirking.

I'm a 'no nonsense' kind of person, and that's the attitude I'd bring to moderation. I'm fair and reasonable, but I have an eye for questions, comments, and answers that stray from sincere expression into propaganda, badgering, trolling, or just plain argumentative circles. I solve issues through communication instead of action where possible — teaching good expression is better than nipping off bad expression — but I have no problem taking action when needed. I'm also quite willing to be convinced I'm wrong, if one makes a convincing argument. That's the other irreducible side of communication.

I'd like to think I'd bring a philosophical flair that the site is currently lacking. I'm well versed in political philosophy and communication theory, so I often see angles to things that aren't obvious to others. That extra perspective can be valuable in problematic cases, where cut-and-dried rules don't necessarily fit well.

So... Open for comments!

Hi,

I'm new to this community and would like to nominate myself simply to participate in the process.

I have no illusions that my whopping total of two posts will convince anyone that I am trustworthy enough or dedicated enough to fill this role. Rather, I see only two candidates for two positions with only three days left for nominations, and I think that's a shame. I believe that elected officials are more legitimate when seriously challenged.

If elected I will:

• Encourage editing bad faith questions into their strongest forms
• Treat every question in good faith
• Eat my hat
• Visit the meta

Please don't vote for me as a joke it legitimately won't be funny.

My answers to the 2020 Moderator Candidate Questionnaire

Hi, I hereby nominate me, agc. Yay.

As a mod, I would:

• Prune irrelevant or discourteous stuff.
• When there is doubt, provide tediously clear reasons why things were or were not done.
• Keep useful portions of comments. That is, if a comment is useful and cogent, but is marred by a user's occasional fit of Tourette's, keep the useful part, and edit out the fit. (As opposed to: prophylactic nuking of entire comment thread.)
• Respect and tolerate opposing viewpoints.
• Admit mistakes.

I wouldn't:

• Define fellow community members narrowly, and abandon controversial, outspoken, and minority voices in favor of a mainstream status quo spectrum.

  (e.g. I wouldn't condone a several year suspension to outspoken anti-racist user guest271314.)

• Close useful questions merely for being:

  1. difficult to answer,
  2. abstract, (abstraction is confused with vagueness)
  3. contentious, (thus forbidding questions about an Emperor's New Clothes)
  4. or having several possible answers.

I'm JJJ and I'm nominating myself for moderator. The reason for my nomination is that I think the community should have a real choice come October. I'm not overly eager to become your moderator, but I'm motivated to put in the time to help this community flourish. I'd like to be the safe pair of hands that follows the course set by the existing moderator team.

Policy views

• I support the way suspensions are done currently. I think they should start small and, if needed, grow bigger as disruptive behavior continues. While I'm not familiar with the entire decision-making process behind the suspensions, I do believe longer suspensions should be considered by the moderator team as a whole.
• I'm in favor of moving discussions in comments to chat if they don't violate other rules.
• I’m aware that moderator actions carry more weight. I’ve always gone through the review queues choosing what I thought was the best action. As a moderator, I think the added weight comes with a higher standard. Therefore, as a mod I would take action when I am convinced it’s the right one. When in doubt, I’ll try to reach out to the other mods to get another look at the situation.

I'm nominating myself as moderator for 3 reasons:

(a) This election needs more candidates
(b) I have a lot of experience on the S.E. network as a whole, though 
     less on this community than on some others like Stack Overflow
(c) I believe strongly in the value of S.E. as the single most high-quality interactive 
      knowledge store, thus I believe that the cultivation of communities 
      like Politics is vital

If elected, I would:

• Ease the on-boarding of new community members in the spirit of the Welcome Wagon and help make sure their posts meet our guidelines
• Play the role of janitor (marking duplicates, out of scope questions, etc)
• Be fully transparent for the reasons of each action taken, and work patiently and interactively with users
• Ensure that the community is a non-biased, non-partisan place to seek and obtain knowledge and that it does not devolve into a "forum"
• Commit to being online regularly and frequently

I wouldn't:

• Be impatient
• Be overbearing
• Allow anyone with a controversial topic to be silenced
• Be too quick to close any well-written legitimate question

Thank you.

Hi, I'm CDJB, and I'm nominating myself for moderator.

Why?

Although the quality of contributions on this site is generally very high, I sometimes come across issues - repeated bad-faith questions/answers, long arguments in comments, & attempts to treat this place as a campaigning platform as opposed to a Q&A site. Tools granted to high-rep users allow some issues to be dealt with, however often all I can do is raise a flag.

What would I do?

As your moderator, I would uphold our contribution quality standards, engage with CMs to progress our overdue graduation and promote the site's interests, & help balance the workload of the existing moderator team. I believe in a light-touch approach to moderation, but would not shy away from taking action against abuse, unethical sock-puppetry, & vote-manipulation.

Why me?

Since joining, I have tried to provide high-quality, impartial contributions, & to improve the site where I can. Although I'm a fairly new face, I believe this would allow me to approach the task of moderation from a fresh perspective. In my opinion, a moderator team with a mix of backgrounds is important, and I hope I can contribute to that.

Hello, you can call me SupriseDog and I'm running for pro-tempore moderator. I'm not much for lengthy prose with self promotion, but I think my record here speaks for itself. I've only been on Stack Exchange for a year or so now, but I've rapidly taken to the layout of the site which encourages fact based Question and Answers without devolving into the unproductive political rants, personal opinions and personal attacks that seem to plague the rest of the Internet. Since I already spend so much time here going through review queues, I am well positioned to take on additional mod duties.

Policy Views:

• Too many questions on this site are being closed or deleted for biased reasons. I support keeping questions open if they ask an interesting question that can be answered with reputable sources.
• I favor allowing discussions to continue as long as they are productive and don't devolve into insults or worthless back and forth.
• Answers should at least attempt to answer the question, otherwise the NotAnAnswer flag should actually be enforced.
• If an answer is nothing more than opinion or a political rant against [insert political group], it should be deleted.