-14

I would like to give feedback to moderators that take action I consider unproductive.

We have all come across popular questions/comment that we would like to up/down vote but that a moderator has locked. The list is pretty long, actually.

Is there such a thing a voting mechanism for moderator actions? The platform would probably benefit from this kind of feedback.

11
  • 5
    You can vote on closed questions. You can't on locked ones.
    – Mat
    May 13 '15 at 10:52
  • 6
    The list of locked questions is pretty short, actually. May 13 '15 at 10:57
  • They must be extremely popular to show up so ofter then. May 13 '15 at 10:58
  • 8
    If they weren't popular, they would probably be deleted instead of locked @MonoThreaded. Locks are usually applied to salvage extremely popular but clearly off topic questions from deletion.
    – yannis
    May 13 '15 at 11:14
  • 3
    @MonoThreaded When you say moderators are you referring to diamond moderators or the users within the community who have earned privileges to close, etc?
    – Taryn
    May 13 '15 at 12:02
  • If you think a post shouldn't be locked, flag a custom moderator flag clearly explaining why you think so.
    – AStopher
    May 13 '15 at 12:16
  • 7
    @cybermonkey: discussing locking / unlocking of posts is best done on Meta.
    – Martijn Pieters Mod
    May 13 '15 at 12:20
  • @bluefeet I am referring to whoever can close/lock a question. This question getting downvoted so much makes me think we have a few in the audience May 13 '15 at 14:16
  • 4
    To Bill's comment, here is a list of all locked questions on SO: stackoverflow.com/… . The majority of those 2446 questions (out of 9.4 million total questions on SO) are locked by the system because they were merges or migrations. Only a relatively tiny number were locked by moderators.
    – Brad Larson Mod
    May 13 '15 at 14:27
  • 4
    Why is it that so many proposals on SO ask for more work from contributors and/or moderators, and none from question-posters? May 13 '15 at 14:42
  • @BradLarson: The 5 locked answered questions closed as duplicate should be sorted out by a moderator, be it by properly re-closing with the same duplicate and/or merging, deleting or whatever... Dec 30 '15 at 3:14
21

There is no way to vote directly on moderator actions. Moderators perform thousands on actions on the site every day. It just would not scale to expect people to vote on these actions.

Other potential problems with your idea:

  1. Some moderator actions have justifications that depend on knowing private information. It would not be possible to make these actions public without violating privacy.

  2. If moderators had every single action micromanaged by the community, I'm quite certain no one would volunteer to be moderator.

  3. Such a voting mechanism could become a venue to pester moderators. Currently if you are really certain a moderator acted out of bounds, you can come to Meta to air your grievances. This is a really good thing because if someone is 100% wrong about whether the moderator acted correctly, they'll get community feedback about it. Conversely, if the person is right, the community will support them. Also, the pressure of bringing up the issue in public acts as a deterrent to those who would like to complain about every little thing.

1
  • 3
    OK, have an upvote, though I would just have gone with 'this idea is insane'. May 13 '15 at 14:38
4

Rather than commenting on the feature request itself, I'll comment on some appropriate action to take when you disagree with any moderator action.


Come to the meta. Post about the situation. Include relevant links (the question, answer, comment, edit, whatever). Explain what actions had been taken before the moderator got involved. Explain what actions the moderator took. Explain what actions you feel should have been taken, and really, really put a lot of effort into explaining why you think the moderator's action was wrong.

And remember to make it all about the specific action and not about any of the users taking any of these actions.


What will happen?

Well, other users might explain to you why your opinion about what action should have been taken is wrong, maybe even citing evidence of the problems your sort of action might cause.

Or the moderator who took the action may show up and explain their actions.

Either of these may satisfy you (perhaps there's an element of the story that you aren't aware of).

Alternatively, also, the moderator may come and admit that their actions were wrong and reverse their own action themselves (because you sufficiently convinced them).

And there's always a chance that other moderators could step in and overrule the standing decision. Please note that this isn't a mark against the moderator who made the decision... it's just changing the end result. All of the moderators are human, and all of them have made mistakes.

2

You found Meta.SO. That is the location where you can discuss such issues, and as you see there's already a vote option there. The direction may perhaps appear inverted: if you post on Meta, you'll be upvoted when people agree with you, but downvoted when people agree with the original moderator decision.

That said, I don't see a big need to vote on closed questions.

2
  • I meant voting on the action itself. As for voting on closed questions,it allows emphasis on important contribution. May 13 '15 at 10:57
  • Well, if you disagree with a closure you can always vote to re-open @MonoThreaded (once you earn 3K rep, that is).
    – yannis
    May 13 '15 at 12:36

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .
https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/294179/moderating-moderators
meta.stackoverflow.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2021-49
139327
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:VKYL2CLS7YSCZSKTGTHTPDWTVL7FMYTI
<urn:uuid:1fb485fd-1b93-41bb-b5b8-7fbea59c9fb9>
2021-12-04T08:53:00Z
151.101.1.69
text/html
sha1:4WGA2WS63UWSWWTN3EODU4CQ6BARZMSO
<urn:uuid:cdaca0ac-5cbb-4257-aabe-c32c365410d3>
https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/294179/moderating-moderators
response
<urn:uuid:61d647b8-206f-4f41-be10-fb0d625da1b9>
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2021-49
publisher: Common Crawl
description: Wide crawl of the web for November/December 2021
operator: Common Crawl Admin (info@commoncrawl.org)
hostname: ip-10-67-67-6
software: Apache Nutch 1.18 (modified, https://github.com/commoncrawl/nutch/)
robots: checked via crawler-commons 1.3-SNAPSHOT (https://github.com/crawler-commons/crawler-commons)
format: WARC File Format 1.1
conformsTo: https://iipc.github.io/warc-specifications/specifications/warc-format/warc-1.1/