Writing only my personal perspective. I haven’t checked this with other moderators or advisors.
adding something like 1 FTE or 2 x 0.5 FTE moderators wouldn’t be that expensive
I think an important cost would be the opportunity cost for what those moderators could be doing.
For me personally, the theory of change for spending more time on moderation is often not that clear. My personal theory of change is that the main value I provide via moderation is to save time/​energy for Lizka and JP to focus a bit more on projects that I think are extremely valuable. (Edit: This is just my personal view! I don’t work for CEA, and I think they disagree with this!)
seems like moderators who joined in 2022 did a pretty good job
As one of these mods, I think I also made some prettyclearmistakes[1], even one year into this, that I think more experienced mods wouldn’t have made. I think the new mods went through a better selection process, though, so I’m optimistic that it will take less time for them to make better decisions.
Tangentially related to this point, I think 99% of the moderation action on this forum comes from users (via voting, commenting, and reporting posts). I think that’s how it should be, and I’m really impressed by how well users of this forum moderate discussions, compared to e.g. serious subreddits, Twitter spheres, or Hacker News.
I was also the moderator who pushed the most to move this to personal blog, as I (wrongly) didn’t see a strong connection between this post and doing good better.
Writing only my personal perspective. I haven’t checked this with other moderators or advisors.
I think an important cost would be the opportunity cost for what those moderators could be doing.
For me personally, the theory of change for spending more time on moderation is often not that clear. My personal theory of change is that the main value I provide via moderation is to save time/​energy for Lizka and JP to focus a bit more on projects that I think are extremely valuable. (Edit: This is just my personal view! I don’t work for CEA, and I think they disagree with this!)
As one of these mods, I think I also made some pretty clear mistakes[1], even one year into this, that I think more experienced mods wouldn’t have made. I think the new mods went through a better selection process, though, so I’m optimistic that it will take less time for them to make better decisions.
Tangentially related to this point, I think 99% of the moderation action on this forum comes from users (via voting, commenting, and reporting posts). I think that’s how it should be, and I’m really impressed by how well users of this forum moderate discussions, compared to e.g. serious subreddits, Twitter spheres, or Hacker News.
I was also the moderator who pushed the most to move this to personal blog, as I (wrongly) didn’t see a strong connection between this post and doing good better.