Murch
- How would you deal with a user who produced a steady stream of valuable answers, but tends to generate a large number of arguments/flags from comments?
Assuming that the arguments and flags are discussed on the user's posts, I would help keep the comments civil and constructive. If the pattern persists, I would message the user privately to point out what is happening and share some ideas what we would like them to change about their activity on the site. If the user doesn't change their behaviour, I would consider moving to suspend them only if their behaviour is sufficiently disruptive or likely to drive away other users. If most of their content is valuable and it's not too much effort to sanitize on a per post basis, I'd probably wait for the situation to develop further.
- How would you handle a situation where another mod closed/deleted/etc a question that you feel shouldn't have been?
I would ping the other mod in our chat to inquire about their reasoning to do so. I'd share my idea how the post could have been handled and ask what they think about that.
I'd seek this conversation more often in the beginning as we get to know each other better. Later, if I don't feel strongly about a post, I'd expect that I'd just go with the judgement of my peer as anything else would waste both of our time.
- What is the most pressing issue of the Bitcoin Stackexchange and how will you approach it if elected as a moderator?
In the past years, we've been mostly suffering from low community participation in running the site. This has expressed in long review queues and low-quality content sticking around longer than necessary.
I would like to try to use the attention we're generating with the election to jumpstart our meta and chat activity. I think that both would also help people to feel a stronger ownership for the site and may benefit site maintenance.
While review queues could use a little more love, there has been a positive trend with new contributors and old ones returning in the past months. I think that we may be closing a bit too quickly in some instances lately, and we might want to have more discussions about some posts.
- Moderators are called in when something is amiss. When you're elected, a noticeable portion of your time spent on Bitcoin.SE will be evaluating posts that other users flagged for your attention. You'll encounter junk on a daily basis, and on days when you're hard-pressed for time, it may be your only window into the site. Meanwhile, we're asking you to offer patient and diplomatic guidance to the users that tried to contribute. What's your motivation to run for such a job? Why is it important for you to be a moderator? What do you bring to the moderation team to complement your fellow moderators?
There are few good sources of information about Bitcoin. Many tend to become outdated, or don't make the information available persistently. Bitcoin.Stackexchange.com is a site that provides quality information that is easily retrievable. As such it is a way for main contributors in the space to share knowledge efficiently while the effort of maintaining the integrity and quality of the information can be shared.
While the encounters with low-quality contributions, spam and trolls can be frustrating at times, I am strongly motivated due to my work helping other Bitcoin contributors to have more time for other things while at the same time facilitating an extensive learning resource for the broader community. Bitcoin.Stackexchange.com was my main source in learning about Bitcoin and I'd be happy to help provide this learning experience to more people.
- Given the highly political nature of this space, how would you deal with questions/answers/comments which use derogatory terms like Bcash or BScore, SegwitCoin or BizCoin? What about questions that knowingly or unknowingly promote certain client software for Bitcoin?
I would like Bitcoin.stackexchange.com to remain as apolitical as possible. The site's community is self-governed in that it sets its own topic scope, enforces its own rules and elects its own moderators. If posts are on-topic they'll get appropriate attention with edits, answers and tags as any other that are.
Posts with the intent to provoke are covered by our "be nice" policy: as long as they are unambiguous in what they are referring to, they can usually be easily edited to remove any provocations. Posts that purely consist of provocation can be removed without losing any quality content.
In regard to posts that promote certain client software, foremost, questions need to ask something that we can answer objectively, and answers need to address the question, provide explanation and include evidence or arguments. As before, we should remove tangential information and distill valuable answers. Clearly, posts that are solely promoting software usage would be off-topic.
- In your opinion, what do moderators do?
Moderators help maintain the frame in which the site's community builds a comprehensive body of questions and answers for the site's topic. We muck out the stable, fight off the broken window syndrome, and are human exception handlers when something goes amiss.
- A diamond will be attached to everything you say and have said in the past, including questions, answers and comments. Everything you will do will be seen under a different light. How do you feel about that?
When I first became a moderator on this site, it was especially daunting to me that people might be misled by old content I had created when I first started using the site. To that end, I've been reevaluating and improving such content whenever an old post of mine got new comments or upvotes. After being around for a few years, I am confident in my judgement about what topics I should comment on or not. I've also become more conscious about clearly communicating my level of confidence in information that I provide in posts. Finally, I rigorously add explanations and feedback when I interact with posts.
- In what way do you feel that being a moderator will make you more effective as opposed to simply reaching 10k or 20k rep?
Being a moderator has allowed me to significantly improve our tagging situation in the past years. For example, I've burninated more than 50 tags, I've eradicated the tag mining by splitting it up into ten other tags and retagging more than 1200 questions, and made 66 posts about tags on meta.
I've cleaned up several clusters of duplicate trees and established some canonical questions.
By deleting almost 700 posts and closing more than 2000 questions, I've significantly reduced the time that other people had to invest addressing bad/duplicate content.
